In the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, forty-four authorities from six countries survey the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity-serious and satirical, public and private, by men and women, nobles and peasants, whether published in deluxe editions or sung on the streets. The contributors discuss poems in social contexts, poetic identities, poetic subjects, poetic form, poetic genres, poetic devices, and criticism. Even experts in eighteenth-century poetry will see familiar poems from new angles, and all readers will encounter poems they've never read before. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of these poetic works, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

The poetry produced by the British poets of the 17th and 18th centuries is considered to be among the best ever written. But many general readers feel intimidated by the language or structure of the poetry, and so tend to shy away from enjoying these poets and their works. Nelson takes readers on a tour of the major works and figures of 17th- and 18th-century British poetry, explaining major themes, devices, styles, language, rhythm, sound, tone, imagery, form, and meaning. Beginning each chapter with a sketch of the poet's life and career, the author then looks at five or six representative works, helping readers understand and appreciate the beauty of poetry itself. From Donne and Jonson, to Pope, Swift, and Burns, the book offers excerpts of the poetry these artists crafted, and carefully examines the various attributes that have helped to establish them as some of the greatest of all time. Writing in clear, accessible language, Nelson also introduces general poetry terms to the novice, providing examples and explanations where necessary. Readers will no longer feel intimidated by "difficult poetry." Instead, they will walk away with the tools they need to read, understand, and appreciate these titans of British letters.

Boedecker and Sider's edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection which will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and Syria's Asma Al-Assad rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley - and with the Trouser Thief Clive met during ten long weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward - in this offbeat and affectionate poetic biography. Since 2010, when Clive was told he had three separate life-threatening conditions, he has poured out a stream of fine poems - sometimes light, witty and paradoxical, sometimes sad, heartfelt and regretful. Some, like `Japanese Maple', an instant Internet sensation, have already made it into the anthologies. Others, like his book-length epic, The River in the Sky, are more demanding. All are packed with the unexpected ideas, inventive imagery and breathtaking wordplay that have helped him achieve his avowed ambition of becoming `a fairly major minor poet'.

This vivid biography is a study of the life and times of the Italian poet-activist, Lauro de Bosis. Remarkably productive as a poet, cultural diplomat, and political subversive, de Bosis founded and lead an underground resistance group, the National Alliance for Liberty. His actions culminated in a dramatic solo flight over Rome in October 1931, showering the city with protest leaflets against the Fascist dictatorship before plunging to his death. This feat brought world attention to the existence of anti-Fascism, much to Mussolini's chagrin and rage.

De Bosis's story, told against the backdrop of Rome's politics in the 1920s, is at once personal, national, and international. World figures --- from Mussolini, Croce, Ezra Pound, to Walter Lippmann, Thornton Wilder, and his lover, the actress Ruth Draper --- were all within de Bosis's compass. Gifted, quirky, original, and impulsive but principled to the point of giving up both personal love and family for his cause, his life shows how Mussolini's regime systematically cleared out the cream of Italy's young liberal intellectuals. Based on previously untapped archival resources, this is the first biography of a young, gifted Italian poet who dared to challenge the power of a totalitarian state with his practical idealism and fierce determination to protect Italy's fragile democracy from il Duce.

Faced with the chaos and banality of modern, everyday life, a number of Victorian poets sought innovative ways of writing about the unpoetic present in their verse. Their varied efforts are recognisably akin, not least in their development of mixed verse-forms that fused novel and epic to create something equal to the miscellaneousness of the age.

Claudian was one of the last great Latin poets of the classical tradition, writing at the imperial court in Milan in the late fourth to early fifth century AD. With the current upsurge of research into late antiquity, he is a figure of great interest who has been undeservedly neglected - a creative artist with an immense knowledge of classical literature and a distinctive literary style. His works have been mined for what they reveal about the history of the period, as he largely wrote political propaganda for members of the court circle; but the De Raptu Proserpinae is fascinating in that it shows him working with subject matter of more personal choice. J. B. Hall has already produced two editions of the work, which deal exhaustively with the complicated manuscript traditions; but he self-confessedly leaves aside literary questions, which are the subject of this commentary. This is therefore the first study to look at the poem as a work of literary interest in its own right. The book includes a text designed to simplify Hall's apparatus, and a facing translation to make the work more accessible to non-specialists.

Taking into account the latest criticism, this book argues that Hardy seems contemporary with D.H. Lawrence in his insights into the unconscious and sexuality, and has been the model for the contemporary reaction against modernist poetry. The book goes on to say that Hardy reversed his usual emphasis on sexuality in The Mayor of Casterbridge and his last novel, The Well-Beloved.

Homer's poetry is widely recognized as the beginning of the literary tradition of the West and among its most influential canonical texts. Outlining a series of key themes, ideas, and values associated with Homer and Homeric poetry, Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed explores the question of the formation of the Iliad and the Odyssey - the so-called 'Homeric Problem'. Among the main Homeric themes which the book considers are origin and form, orality and composition, heroic values, social structure, and social bias, gender roles and gendered interpretation, ethnicity, representations of religion, mortality, and the divine, memory, poetry, and poetics, and canonicity and tradition, and the history of Homeric receptions. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of scholarship on Homer and early epic, Ahuvia Kahane explores contemporary critical and philosophical questions relating to Homer and the Homeric tradition, and examines his wider cultural impact, contexts and significance. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential poet, providing readers with some basic suggestions for further pursuing their interests in Homer.

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Holderlin, Verlaine, George, Morike, and Yeats in detail, Benjamin Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. The book sets out to prove that using the idea of perfection, which is applied routinely as a criterion of excellence in lyric poems, is fundamentally misguided. Once poetry in the Western tradition is established as fundamentally imperfect, Bennett reveals it to be as deeply exposed to problems in the social and political environment as any other form of literature.

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.

This book offers a fresh contextual reading of Paradise Lost that suggests that a recovery of the vital intellectual ferment of the new science, magic, and alchemy of the seventeenth century reveals new and unexpected aspects of Milton's cosmos and chaos, and the characters of the angels and Adam and Eve. After examining the contextual references to cabalism, hermeticism, and science in the invocations and in the presentation of chaos and Night, the book focuses on the central stage of the epic action, Milton's unique cosmos, at once finite and infinite, with its re-orientation of compass points. While Milton relies on the new astronomy, optics and mechanics in configuring his cosmos, he draws upon alchemy to suggest that the imagined prelapsarian cosmos is the crucible within which vital re-orientations of authority could have taken place.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This text answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

Containing over 500 annotated entries for individual poets and several anthologies, this work presents a substantial collection of poems that have been inspired by blues and jazz. Thousands of poems written between 1916 and the present are included. References to individual jazz figures addressed in the poetry are cross-referenced. The range of poems includes homages to jazz musicians and work written primarily to be read with jazz accompaniment. This wide selection of poetry offers a unique guide to the poetry inspired by jazz musicians and their music.

Of interest to scholars and jazz enthusiasts alike, this substantial bibliography, annotated by author and cross-referenced by musician, presents a wealth of information previously unavailable in a single source. The jazz-related poetry identified will attract a range of writers and musicians. Furthermore, the broad variety of poets and anthologies presented crosses many boundaries and will also interest scholars of 20th century poetry, African American literature, and American literature.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: Emily Wilson's authoritative translation of Homer's masterpiece, accompanied by her informative introduction, explanatory footnotes and book-by-book summaries. Four maps, created especially for this translation. Contextual materials including sources and analogues by Homer, Sappho, Pindar and others. Also included are carefully chosen passages from (mainly) ancient texts that provide insight into The Odyssey and its reception by Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Pseudo-Longinus, Lucian, Apollodorus, Heraclitus, Porphyry, Proclus, Hyginus, Dante Alighieri, Alfred Lord Tennyson, C. P. Cavafy, Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood. Nine critical essays addressing key topics-composition; representation of religion and the gods; class and slavery; gender; colonisation and the meaning of home; trickery, intelligence and lying; and more- essential to the study of The Odyssey. Essays by Robert Fowler, Laurel Fulkerson, Barbara Graziosi, Laura M. Slatkin, Sheila Murnaghan, Patrice Rankine, Helene P. Foley, Egbert J. Bakker and Lillian Eileen Doherty are included. A glossary and a list of suggested further readings. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format-annotated text, contexts and criticism-helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and inventive variations on topics in literary theory The Winnowing Fan makes a strong case for revising received ideas about the scope and limits of criticism. Norris's poems traverse the full range of European poetic history from Homer's Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarme, to modern writers such as Yeats, Benjamin, Heaney, Larkin, and Barthes. There are also verse-essays and shorter pieces on philosophers from Hume and Leibniz to Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, de Man, Rorty, Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben. In each case Norris seeks to free criticism from conventional academic forms and return it to an active mutual engagement with the practice of literature itself.

This book aims to provide the reader of Homer with the traditional knowledge and fluency in Homeric poetry which an original ancient audience would have brought to a performance of this type of narrative. To that end, Adrian Kelly presents the text of Iliad VIII next to an apparatus referring to the traditional units being employed, and gives a brief description of their semantic impact. He describes the referential curve of the narrative in a continuous commentary, tabulates all the traditional units in a separate lexicon of Homeric structure, and examines critical decisions concerning the text in a discussion which employs the referential method as a critical criterion. Two small appendices deal with speech introduction formulae, and with the traditional function of Here and Athene in early Greek epic poetry.

York Notes offer an exciting and fresh approach to the study of literature. The easy-to-use guides aim to provide a better understanding and appreciation of each text, encouraging students to form their own ideas and opinions. This makes study more enjoyable and leads to exam success. York Notes will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: How to study the text - Author and historical background - General and detailed summaries - Commentary on themes, structure, characters, language and style - Glossaries - Test questions and issues to consider - Essay-writing advice - Cultural connections - Literary terms - Illustrations - Colour design. General Editors: John Polley - Senior GCSE Examiner Head of English, Harrow Way Community School, Andover; Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton.

Often thought of as the quintessential poet of New England, Robert Frost is one of the most widely read American poets of the 20th century. He was a master of poetic form and imagery, his works seemed to capture the spirit of America, and he became so emblematic of his country that he read his work at President Kennedy's inauguration and traveled to Israel, Greece, and the Soviet Union as an emissary of the U.S. State Department. While many readers think of him as the personification of New England, he was born in San Francisco, published his first book of poetry in England, matured as a poet while abroad, taught for several years at the University of Michigan, and spent many of his winters in Florida. This reference helps illuminate the hidden complexities of his life and work.

Included in this volume are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Frost's life and writings. Each of his collected poems is treated in a separate entry, and the book additionally includes entries on such topics as his public speeches, various colleges and universities with which he was associated, the honors that he won, his biographers, films about him, poets, and others whom he knew, and similar items. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and closes with a brief bibliography. The volume also provides a chronology and concludes with a general bibliography of major studies.