This book aims to put Walter de la Mare back on the literary map. A writer beloved by many, he has nevertheless remained on the sidelines of literary history. Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals promises to restore his reputation as one of the most memorably haunting of poets, as well as a peculiarly unnerving writer of ghost stories. A collection of varied, wide-ranging essays on de la Mare's poetry, stories, novels, reviews and lectures, it puts his work beside that of many of his famous contemporaries, including Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield. It also contains an invaluable survey of his archive, much of it unpublished, and a number of newly commissioned poems reflecting on his legacy. This multifaceted volume will be of interest to students working on twentieth-century poetry, the short story, the nature and limits of modernism and British intellectual history, as well as on de la Mare himself. List of contributors: Catherine Charlwood, Guy Cuthbertson, Peter Davidson, Giles de la Mare, Andrew Doyle, Suzannah V. Evans, Adam Guy, Robin Holloway, Yui Kajita, Zaffar Kunial, Gregory Leadbetter, Angela Leighton, Erica McAlpine, Jenny McDonnell, Will May, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, A. J. Nickerson, Seamus Perry, Adrian Poole, Camille Ralphs, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Peter Scupham, A. E. Stallings, Mark Valentine, Rory Waterman, Anne Welsh, David Wheatley, Rowan Williams, William Wootten.

Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of "religious poems", some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.

In a follow-up to his previous Homeric studies, noted classicist Paolo Vivante explores Homer's verse, highlighting rhythm rather than metre. Rhythmical qualities, he argues, constitute the force of the verse-for example, in the way the words take position and in the way each pause hints suspense, producing an immediate sense of time. Vivante's main concern is not with the techniques or rules of the verse-composition, but more philosophically with verse itself as a fundamental form of human expression. This study will be of interest to both students and scholars.

"This dictionary brings together in one volume information on Byron's work, life and times. Areas covered include his poetry and prose; authors and works known to him; genres, forms, styles; his life, biographers and incarnations on stage and screen; manuscripts and editions; historical, social and cultural contexts; and his influence on other art"--Provided by publisher.

Defying critical suggestions that the pastoral elegy is obsolete, Iain Twiddy reveals the popularity of the form in the work of major contemporary poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Reading. As Twiddy outlines the development of the form, he identifies its characteristics and functions. But more importantly his study accounts for the enduring appeal of the pastoral elegy, why poets look to its conventions during times of personal distress and social disharmony, and how it allows them to recover from grief, loss and destruction. Informed by current debates and contemporary theories of mourning, Twiddy discusses themes of war and peace, social pastoral and environmental change, draws on the enduring influence of both Classical and Romantic poetics and explores poets' changing relationships with pastoral elegy throughout their careers. The result is a study that demonstrates why the pastoral elegy is still a flourishing and dynamic form in contemporary British and Irish poetry.

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the entire range of Tennyson's poetry, with emphasis on the great period up to and including In Memoriam, but also with chapters on Maud, the Idylls of the King, and the best of the later poems. Taking the view that every poem contains its own literary history, Dwight Culler traces Tennyson's evolving image of himself as a poet and the relation of this image to changing literary structures. He particularly emphasizes the "frame" device by which Tennyson first mediated between himself and the world and then, inverting it, placed himself in the world. He also explores the longer "composted" poem by which Tennyson declared himself a Victorian Alexandrian. Eschewing the autobiographical emphasis of recent years, Culler provides readings of Maud, Locksley Hall, The Palace of Art, Tithonus, and the Idylls of the King that depart significantly from previous interpretations. His sympathy for the Victorian element in Tennyson also recovers for modern taste several neglected areas of the poetry: the English Idylls, the civic poem, and the poems of social converse. Culler sees Tennyson's faith in the magical power of the word as the source of his gift and, when he loses that faith, the reason for its decline.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

This anthology recovers a tradition of writing to which some of the greatest medieval and Renaissance poets - women as well as men - contributed. Centring on Shakespeare's neglected A Louers Complaint, it includes `female'-voiced lyrics, chronicle poems, and fictional letters by a range of authors from Chaucer to Aphra Behn and Henry Carey. The texts are freshly edited from early manuscript and printed sources, and extensive, helpful glosses are provided. In his illuminating introduction, John Kerrigan outlines the development of 'female complaint', indicates how cultural pressures shaped it, and argues that the time is ripe for a revaluation of this literary genre. Shedding new light on Shakespeare and on the conventions of historical, pastoral, and epistolary discourse, Motives of Woe will be of interest to scholars in several branches of medieval and early modern studies.

Chaucer was a keen observer of the lives of women with a remarkable ability to see beyond his culture's preconceptions concerning their proper roles. The lives of medieval women were divided into three estates--virginity, wifehood, and widowhood--each with complex rules extending to particulars of speech and dress, but all directed toward the single purpose of preserving female chastity, for which a woman was to be prepared to suffer or even die. Margaret Hallissy's lively and literate study traces Chaucer's female characterizations against a background of medieval rules and common assumptions governing women to determine where he adhered to or departed from the behavioral norms. She concludes that he discounted much of these codes of conduct as being detrimental to the development of a full human person. The Wife of Bath, Chaucer's most drastic deviation from the received wisdom about women of his day, could only have been developed by an author/narrator who turned from the prescribed written rules--which, sacred or secular, were all instruments of patriarchal power--to female discourse and action. Applying insights from the works of modern social historians of the Middle Ages and ranging widely in sources from the visual arts, civil and canon law, homiletics, theology, architecture, fashion history, and medicine, Hallissy illuminates the preconceptions with which Chaucer's original audience would have encountered his work and brings her findings to bear on a close analysis of literary characters in the text. The resulting study provides an original and essential dimension for reading Chaucer, while its feminist-historicist approach broadens the audience to those interested in medieval studies and women's studies in general.

This book traces the creative process in Yeats's writing, in his making and remaking of verse, and in the development of a whole body of work during the last forty years of his life. Lyrical and philosophical poetry, verse-drama, the shifting contexts of personal and political events -including controversy, world and civil war, and a large dose of artistic experimentation - are all dealt with here. The book is illustrated and loaded with unpublished material, including the extant remains of Yeats's ambitious but unfinished 'fifth play for dancers', based on the local legends of Ballylee that Yeats made his own. The book addresses overlooked or inadequately presented findings in Yeats studies and brings to light much wholly new matter, including a comprehensive 'Chronology' of the composition of poems, the first since Ellmann's The Identity of Yeats. The book welcomes newcomers interested in detailed narratives about poetry 'well-made' and life well-lived.

In 1953 African-American poet Langston Hughes began corresponding with several South African writers variously affiliated with the legendary "Drum" magazine. Published here for the first time, these letters provide an invaluable glimpse into the growing repression of South African apartheid and the slow but painful progress of the American Civil Rights movement. Revealing a fascinating set of transatlantic friendships between a titan of American letters and a group of writers that includes Peter Clarke, Todd Matshikiza, Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Peter Abrahams, and Richard Rive, this volume highlights Hughes’s enormous influence on the rise of English-language literature by black and mixed-race writers in South Africa.

Dudley Randall was one of the foremost voices in African American literature during the twentieth century, best known for his poetry and his work as the editor and publisher of Broadside Press in Detroit. While he published six books of poetry during his life, much of his work is currently out of print or fragmented among numerous anthologies. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall brings together his most popular poems with his lesser-known short stories, first published in The Negro Digest during the 1960s, and several of his essays, which profoundly influenced the direction and attitude of the Black Arts movement. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall is arranged in seven sections: "Images from Black Bottom," "Wars: At Home and Abroad," "The Civil Rights Era," "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects," "Love Poems," "Dialectics of the Black Aesthetic," and "The Last Leap of the Muse." Poems and prose are mixed throughout the volume and are arranged roughly chronologically. Taken as a whole, Randall's writings showcase his skill as a wordsmith and his affinity for themes of love, human contradictions, and political action. His essays further contextualize his work by revealing his views on race and writing, aesthetic form, and literary and political history. Editor Melba Joyce Boyd introduces this collection with an overview of Randall's life and career. The collected writings in Roses and Revolutions not only confirm the talent and the creative intellect of Randall as an author and editor but also demonstrate why his voice remains relevant and impressive in the twenty-first century. Randall was named the first Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit and received numerous awards for his literary work, including the Life Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1986. Students and teachers of African American literature as well as readers of poetry will appreciate this landmark volume.

Through the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.

Homer, as we have come to know, was an oral poet. He composed two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and performed them without the aid of writing. Each of these tales is the length of a substantial book. How, we wonder, could a poet such as Homer have woven such tales? This book is a study of Homer from a cognitive perspective. The author draws on work in cognitive psychology and linguistics to show how a storyteller who performs before a listening audience works with the resources of memory to produce his tale.

From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green s cultural study reveals the role of "Mountain Whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia s essential role in shaping America s understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South.

Robert Durling's spirited new prose translation of the Paradiso completes his masterful rendering of the Divine Comedy. Durling's earlier translations of the Inferno and the Purgatorio garnered high praise, and with this superb version of the Paradiso readers can now traverse the entirety of Dante's epic poem of spiritual ascent with the guidance of one of the greatest living Italian-to-English translators.
Reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the Purgatorio, in the Paradiso the poet-narrator journeys with her through the heavenly spheres and comes to know "the state of blessed souls after death." As with the previous volumes, the original Italian and its English translation appear on facing pages. Readers will be drawn to Durling's precise and vivid prose, which captures Dante's extraordinary range of expression--from the high style of divine revelation to colloquial speech, lyrical interludes, and scornful diatribes against corrupt clergy.
This edition boasts several unique features. Durling's introduction explores the chief interpretive issues surrounding the Paradiso, including the nature of its allegories, the status in the poem of Dante's human body, and his relation to the mystical tradition. The notes at the end of each canto provide detailed commentary on historical, theological, and literary allusions, and unravel the obscurity and difficulties of Dante's ambitious style . An unusual feature is the inclusion of the text, translation, and commentary on one of Dante's chief models, the famous cosmological poem by Boethius that ends the third book of his Consolation of Philosophy. A substantial section of Additional Notes discusses myths, symbols, and themes that figure in all three cantiche of Dante's masterpiece. Finally, the volume includes a set of indexes that is unique in American editions, including Proper Names Discussed in the Notes (with thorough subheadings concerning related themes), Passages Cited in the Notes, and Words Discussed in the Notes, as well as an Index of Proper Names in the text and translation. Like the previous volumes, this final volume includes a rich series of illustrations by Robert Turner.

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

The sixteenth-century French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Guillaume Du Bartas enjoyed a wide, immediate and long-lasting, but varied and mixed reception throughout early modern Europe. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe is the first book-length volume to explore the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other. It takes into account the great variety of their readerships, including translators, imitating poets, poetical theorists, illustrators and painters, both male and female (Marie de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet), some of them illustrious (Tasso, King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Opitz...), others less known, even obscure, but worth to be saved from oblivion (such as the French Marc-Antoine Chalon, the English Mary Roper, and the Dutch poet Philibert van Borsselen). This volume offers a fascinating insight into the different reception modes in Europe and their underlying political, religious and literary identities. Contributors include: Peter Auger, Denis Bjai, Karel Bostoen , Philippe Chomety, Paola Cosentino, Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, Alisa van de Haar, Padraic Lamb, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Elisabeth Rothmund, Paul J. Smith, and Caroline Trotot.

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. "The Forms of Renaissance Thought" celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

Lizette Woodworth Reese was a professional, independent woman from the time she left high school in 1873. She began her teaching career that year and published her first poem in Baltimore's Southern Magazine in 1874. She taught for 45 years in the public schools of Baltimore. Her poetry and her readings of it were particularly popular in women's roups throughout the United States. She was one of the founders of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore and its chairman of poetry until her death in 1935. In April, 1931 she was named Poet Laureate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In that same month, she was iven an honorary doctorate of literature by Goucher College which called her one of the greatest living women in America. In her lifetime, Reese was internationally admired for her poetic genius and hailed by H.L. Mencken as one of the most distinguished poets in the United States. This volume is the first extensive collection of her poems since her Selected Poems was published in 1926. The volume begins with a short biographical sketch of the poet and includes some 250 of her poems. The poems are arranged into sections illustrating some of her major themes: nature, love, remembrance, faith, family, history, and literature. An eighth section contains a complete narrative poem, Little Henrietta, about the life and death of a young girl. Introductory comments help to place Reese in the continuum of American poetry and to indicate her influence on succeeding generations of poets. The book also includes an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

Chris Stamatakis reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. He discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception. Where previous studies have read Wyatt's poetry from a largely biographical standpoint, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and it considers the different types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections that contain his verse. By setting Wyatt's writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational, rhetorical, and courtierly handbooks, Stamatakis examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt's texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to 'turn' or perform the word-to draw out something that lies inert within it. These habits of rewriting and verbal performance often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers in this literary culture. The book pays particular attention to the fascinating materiality of Wyatt's texts: the margins around, and the interlinear spaces within, his poems are regularly filled with new text-handwritten scrawls that are supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt's main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or 'balets'. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission and the copying of Wyatt's poems. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and it shows how acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively and imaginatively.

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyzes the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that, rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasizes the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly, an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.