In this study, Mark Parker argues that magazines such as the London Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine offered an innovative and collaborative space for writers and their work--indeed, magazines became one of the preeminent literary forms of the 1820s and 1830s. Examining the dynamic relationship between literature and culture that evolved within this context, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism claims that writing in such a setting enters into a variety of alliances with other contributions and with ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning.

Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and read in both Latin and English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Introducing readers to a host of new authors and drawing on hundreds of manuscript as well as print sources, it also reinterprets a series of landmarks in English poetry within a bilingual literary context. Ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley, this revelatory survey shows how the forms and fashions of contemporary Latin verse informed key developments in English poetry. As the complex, highly creative interactions between the two languages are revealed, the work reshapes our understanding of what 'English' literary history means.

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. They provide an analytical and historical framework for understanding their subjects. This text looks afresh at Tennyson's life achievements. He blows the dust off Tennyson's image as "perpetually middle-aged" and shows a complex man sustaining his creative powers until the last.

In this collection, an international team of contributors contests the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalization.

Exploration of our inner life-perception, thought, memory, feeling-once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to articulate a vision of human consciousness that is both scientifically informed and poetically truthful. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain examines several contemporary poets-Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and experimentalists such as Harryette Mullen and Tan Lin-to discern what new language, poetic forms, and depictions of selfhood this perplexity forces into being. Nikki Skillman shows that under the sway of physiological conceptions of mind, poets ascribe ever less agency to the self, ever less transformative potential to the imagination. But in readings that unravel factional oppositions in contemporary American poetry, Skillman argues that the lyric-a genre accustomed to revealing expansive aesthetic possibilities within narrow formal limits-proves uniquely positioned to register and redeem the dispersals of human mystery that loom in the age of the brain.

Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain, from the 1780s onward. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, as well as a host of less canonical poet-intellectuals and controversialists of the time. Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lent it a protean energy belied by the more recent conception of "loss of faith."

This original book examines the way in which the Romantic period inaugurates a tradition of writing that demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can only be properly appreciated after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the gendering of the poetic canon, and for understanding the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, paradigmatic figures of the Romantic poet.

Dryden at the end of his life was admired, perhaps even beloved, by many in England, and his greatest skill over his long career-his controlled detachment-uniquely positioned him to write of both history and politics in 1700. His narrative poetry was popular among Whigs and Tories, women and men, Ancients and Moderns, and his imitations suggest historical connections between the War of the Roses, the Civil War, and the Revolution of 1688. All of these events combined easily in the minds of Dryden's contemporaries, and his fables, fraught with conflicted loyalties and family strife not unlike a nation divided, may have caught and compelled his readers in a way that was different from other miscellanies: Dryden may have articulated in beautiful verse the emotions of many in the midst of enormous historical change. Fables is a pivotal cultural text urging national unity through its embrace of competing voices.

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.

This book re-opens the question of Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining the relationship between his confessional writings and his political theory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in which Rousseau's writings were mediated by the speeches and actions of the French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gain a clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to English writers. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearse and reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of the French revolutionary Terror.

This Companion contains fifteen chapters by leading international scholars, who together reflect diverse but complementary approaches to the study of Ezra Pound's poetry and prose. They consider the poetics, foreign influences, economics, politics and publication history of Pound's entire corpus, and also situate Pound's work in the context of Modernism, illustrating his influence on contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Taken together, the chapters offer a sustained examination of one of the most versatile, influential and certainly controversial poets of the modern period.

W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world. This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as that influential idea flows through poetry and into the wider world. Since the invention of the idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful-and useful-idea.

This book examines the legacy of Romantic poetics in the poetry produced in political movements during the nineteenth century. It argues that a communitarian tradition of poetry extending from the 1790s to William Morris in the 1890s learned from and incorporated elements of Romantic lyricism, and produced an ongoing and self-conscious tradition of radical poetics. The book includes new readings of familiar Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Shelley, and provides case studies of relatively unknown Chartist and Republican poets such as Ernest Jones and W.J. Linton.

The Triumph of Augustan Poetics offers an important and original reevaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Starting with Butler's outrageous burlesque, Hudibras, Blanford Parker describes the origins of Augustan satire and its momentous departure from the religious and social writing of an earlier era. He goes on to explain the creation, from the ruins of satire, of a new poetry of nature and everyday life (emerging most significantly in the work of Pope and Thomson), and the ambiguous or hostile responses of writers including Samuel Johnson.

Interest in Martin Heidegger was recently reawakened by the revelations, in his newly published 'Black Notebooks', of the full terrible extent of his political commitments in the 1930s and 1940s. The revelations reminded us of the dark allegiances co-existing with one of the profoundest and most important philosophical projects of the twentieth century-one that is of incomparable importance for literature and especially for poetry, which Heidegger saw as embodying a receptiveness to Being and a resistance to the instrumental tendencies of modernity. Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present is the first extended account of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and the modern lyric. It argues that some of the best-known modern poets in German and English, from Paul Celan to Seamus Heaney and Les Murray, are in deep imaginative affinity with Heidegger's enquiry into finitude, language, and Being. But the work of each of these poets challenges Heidegger because each appeals to a transcendence, taking place in language, that is inseparable from the motion of encounter with embodied others. It is thus poetry which reveals the full measure of Heidegger's relevance in redefining modern selfhood, and poetry which reveals the depth of his blindness.

Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book, Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career, Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian experiments. In doing so, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique and utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake, we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.

This book examines the relationship between literature and religious conflict in seventeenth-century England, showing how literary texts grew out of and addressed the contemporary controversy over ceremonial worship. Examining the meaning and function of religion in seventeenth-century England, the book shows that the conflicts over religious ceremony which were central to the English Revolution had broad cultural significance; they involved not only conflicting attitudes towards art and the body, but a clash between different ways of constructing social relations, human identity, and the relation of the Protestant present to the Jewish, pagan and Catholic past. Achsah Guibbory's readings of Herbert, Herrick, Browne, Donne and Milton explain how their writings show what was at stake in the conflict over ceremonial worship, and how different ideas of community turned on that conflict.

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses and analyzes a specific moment in a writers' work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Ruderman suggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-

Critiquing the politics and dynamics of the transcultural poetics of reading literature, this book demonstrates an ambitious understanding of the concept of the poet across a wide range of traditions - Anglo-American, German, French, Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Bengali, Urdu - and philosophies of creativity that are rarely studied side by side. Ghosh carves out unexplored spaces of negotiation and intersections between literature, aesthetics and philosophy. The book demonstrates an original method of 'global comparison' that displaces the relatively staid and historicist categories that have underpinned comparative literature approaches so far, since they rarely dare stray beyond issues of influence and schools, or new 'world literature' approaches that affirm cosmopolitanism and transnationalism as overarching themes. Going beyond comparatism and reformulating the chronological patterns of reading, this bold book introduces new methodologies of reading literature to configure the concept of the poet from Philip Sidney to T. S Eliot, reading the notion of the poet through completely new theoretical and epistemic triggers. Commonly known texts and sometimes well-circulated ideas are subjected to refreshing reading in what the author calls the 'transcultural now' and (in)fusionised transpoetical matrices. By moving between theories of poetry and literature that come from widely separated times, contexts, and cultures, this book shows the relevance of canonical texts to a theory of the future as marked by post-global concerns.

This is the first sustained examination of Walt Whitman's influence on British socialism. Harris combines a contextual historical study of Whitman's reception with focused close readings of a variety of poems, books, articles, letters and speeches. She calls attention to Whitman's own demand for the reader to 'himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay', linking Whitman's general comments about active reading to specific cases of his fin de siecle British socialist readership. These include the editorial aims behind the Whitman selections published by William Michael Rossetti, Ernest Rhys, and W. T. Stead and the ways that Whitman was interpreted and appropriated in a wide range of grassroots texts produced by individuals or groups who responded to Whitman and his poetry publicly in socialist circles. Harris makes full use of material from the C. F. Sixsmith and J. W. Wallace and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship collections at John Rylands, the Edward Carpenter collection in the Sheffield Archives, and the Archives of Swan Sonnenschein & Co. at the University of Reading. Much of this archive material - little of which is currently available in digital form - is discussed here in full for the first time. Accordingly, this study will appeal to those with interest in the archival history of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the connections to be made between literary and political culture of this era more generally.

Nationalism has given the world a genre of poetry bright with ideals of justice, freedom and the brotherhood of man, but also, at times, burning with humiliation and grievance, hatred and lust for revenge, driving human kind, as the Austrian poet Grillparzer put it, 'From humanity via nationality to bestiality'. National Poetry, Empires and War considers national poetry, and its glorification of war, from ancient to modern times, in a series of historical, social and political perspectives. Starting with the Hebrew Bible and Homer and moving through the Crusades and examples of subsequent empires, this book has much on pre-modern national poetry but focuses chiefly on post-1789 poetry which emerged from the weakening and collapse of empires, as the idealistic liberalism of nationalism in the age of Byron, Whitman, D'Annunzio, Yeats, Bialik, and Kipling was replaced by darker purposes culminating in World War I and the rise of fascism. Many national poets are the subject of countless critical and biographical studies, but this book aims to give a panoramic view of national poetry as a whole. It will be of great interest to any scholars of nationalism, Jewish Studies, history, comparative literature, and general cultural studies.

Bestselling novelist Alexander McCall Smith's charming account of how the poet W. H. Auden has helped guide his life-and how he might guide yours, too When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie-Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith-often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him-and what he just might do for you. Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet's work in the 1970s, while teaching law in Belfast, a violently divided city where Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem about the outbreak of World War II, strongly resonated. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since. For example, he describes how he has found an invaluable reflection on life's transience in "As I Walked Out One Evening," while "The More Loving One" has provided an instructive meditation on unrequited love. McCall Smith shows how Auden can speak to us throughout life, suggesting how, despite difficulties and change, we can celebrate understanding, acceptance, and love for others. An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith's fans and anyone curious about Auden.

For more than ninety years, eager writers and young poets, even those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars assumed that the letters from young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, the letters were recently discovered by Erich Unglaub, a Rilke scholar, and published in German in 2019. The acclaimed translator Damion Searls has now not only retranslated Rilke's original letters but also translated the letters by Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and aspiring poet. This timeless edition, in addition to joining the two sets of letters together for the first time in English, provides a new window into the workings of Rilke's visionary poetic and philosophical mind, allowing us to re-experience the literary genius of one of the most inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.

The centrality of Milton to the study of English literature often obscures the intense debates that rage about this ideological allegiances. The reception and interpretation of Milton's texts consistently present him as either a Christian republican or a committed individualist, a radical, heretical free thinker, or a traditional absolutist. In Milton's Warring Angels, William Kolbrener provides a critical account of the reception and interpretation of Milton's texts. He argues that the governing scheme of Milton criticism, the opposition of 'satanic' and 'angelic' readings, derives from historiographical tradition rooted in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment antithesis between reason and authority, Kolbrener argues, has generated a set of interpretive approaches that inevitably end up violating the meaning of Milton's texts. Kolbrener shows how Milton articulates his thought in lexicons which are never fully assimilable to paradigms of modernity drawn from the Enlightenment. Instead, Milton's prose and poetry mediate between apparently contradictory positions; they join without ever reconciling the satanic and the angelic.