This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as `the mother of mankind', and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's own time, Elizabeth Drury. Meakin's reading of Donne's self-described `masculine perswasive force' asserting itself upon the `incomprehensibleness' of the feminine suggests that the Donne canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme Renaissance poet - revived at the beginning of this century - needs to be carried into the next.

Famously, Blake believed that "without contraries" there could be no "progression." Conflict was integral to his artistic vision, and his style, but it had more to do with critical engagement than any urge to victory. The essays in this volume look at conflict as it marked Blake's thinking on politics, religion and the visual arts.

This is a fascinating literary-critical study of the ways the Virgin Mary has been presented in English poetry, from the later Middle Ages to today. Ranging across a vast variety of approaches to this timeless topic, Spurr shows how poets have spoken of their own beliefs and preoccupations (and of their cultures and their historical periods) in giving poetic expression to the most famous woman in history. Spurr's ground-breaking account is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the history of poetry, of religious verse and of representations of the eternal feminine in literature.

The story of the Beatles begins not with the rock-'n'-roll revolution of the 1950s, but in the Romantic revolution of the 1790s, when age-old notions about literature, politics, education, and social relations changed forever. Tracing the Beatles to their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetic, musical, and philosophic roots, "The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles "weaves literary criticism and cultural analysis together to how the Fab Four--in their songs, personalities, and relations with each other--mirror the themes and history of Anglo-American Romanticism.

Drawing upon a wide range of biographies of literary subjects, from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to William Golding and V.S. Naipaul, this book develops a poetics of literary biography based on the triangular relationships of lives, works and times and how narrative operates in holding them together. Biography is seen as a hybrid genre in which historical and fictional elements are imaginatively combined. It considers the roles of story-telling, factual data in the art of life-writing, and the literariness of its language. It includes a case study of the biography of Ellen Terry, discussion of the controversial relationship between a subject's life and works, 'biographical criticism' and, through the issue of gender, the social and cultural changes biographies reflect. It frames a poetics on the basis of its strategy and tactics and demonstrates how the literal truth of verifiable data and the poetic truth of what is narrated are interdependent.

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

This is a study of ancient didactic poetry, a type of literature which uses verse as the medium for teaching theoretical knowledge or practical skills. Volk combines a general discussion of didactic poetry as a genre in Greek and Latin literature with detailed interpretations of four famous Latin didactic poems by Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Manilius.

This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more accurate understanding of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers.

One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness, a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing, which seems inseparable from the mind's fading as it lets them go. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the young Yeats are elegists of the self; they render life as transparent, ghostlike, dissolving, ungraspable, nearly unrememberable. This vanishing away, this dimness, of Victorian poetry is most obvious in the twilights, mists, shadows, deep horizons, and flowing waters of its central landscape, but it is also a matter of sound and syntax, of repetition and rhythm, texture and line movement. Vanishing Lives examines these features and links them to larger issues, such as the psychology of the individual poets, and the Victorian and modern frames of mind. The tendencies under consideration are less ideas than forms or styles of feeling. They are so universal in the nineteenth century that they may not seem to call for comment, but for all their vagueness they are deep, powerful, resistant to change-an essential stratum of the experience of Victorian poetry. For poets like Yeats, who struggled to move beyond them, they were far more than the trappings of an outmoded poetry. They were a deeply ingrained aesthetic, a style, a morality, not only a way of art to be revised, but a way of living to be outgrown-a Tennysonian way.

Before, during and after the preparation of Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, Wilfred Watson published several articles on Hebrew poetry in a wide range of periodicals. The present volume collects together the most significant of these writings, including a chapter from a book on chiasmus, as well as a few unpublished items. After an opening survey of current work on Hebrew verse the articles cover the following topics: parallelism (including half-line parallelism, previously almost unnoticed), antithesis, word pairs, chiasmus, figurative language and introductions to speech in verse. The last section deals with structural devices and a folktale motif in narrative verse, hyperbole, apostrophe and alliteration. Previously unpublished items are on the contribution of ethnopoetics, from the study of Native American literature to Hebrew narrative verse (a new topic in biblical studies), parallelism in the Song of Songs and a metaphor in Jeremiah. This anthology is intended as a companion volume to Classical Hebrew Poetry. It includes additions and corrections to that book and there are also several indices.>

Through theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.

Archetypal images, Carl Jung believed, when elaborated in tales and ceremonies, shape culture's imagination and behavior. Unfortunately, such cultural images can become stale and lose their power over the mind. But an artist or mystic can refresh and revive a culture's imagination by exploring his personal dream-images and connecting them to the past. Dante Alighieri presents his Divine Comedy as a dream-vision, carefully establishing the date at which it came to him (Good Friday, 1300), and maintaining the perspective of that time and place, throughout the work, upon unfolding history. Modern readers will therefore welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach, which can trace both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche. Some of Dante's innovations (admission of virtuous pagans to Limbo) and individualized scenes (meeting personal friends in the afterlife) more likely spring from unconscious inspiration than conscious didactic intent. For modern readers, a focus on Dante's personal dream-journey may offer the best way into his poem.

The latest in a renowned research-level series, this volume focuses on Yeats's multifarious (especially occult) reading and his iconography. Closely examining the making of his work - a new unfinished play for dancers is presented - the volume turns to his immediate influence in Japan via Yone Noguchi and in England on the work of Dorothy Wellesley, as well as to his legacy in the elegiac poems of W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney.

What does it mean to 'bear blindness' and why should this be a concern for male poets after Milton? This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition. The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This imaginative revisionist study suggests a new interpretative framework for Victorian men's poetry, while providing detailed and extensive re-readings of many major poems The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.

Byron is at the forefront of debate on politics, gender, sexuality, reception studies and popular culture in the Romantic period. This collection presents twelve outstanding new essays on Byron by leading critics from the US, Canada, and the UK including Steven Bruhm, Peter Cochran, Paul Curtis, Caroline Franklin, Peter Kitson, Ghislaine McDayter, Tim Morton, David Punter and Pamela Kao, Michael Simpson, Philip Shaw, Nanora Sweet and Susan Wolfson.

Nelly Sachs. The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation examines the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. It firstly shifts established patterns of reception by analysing the author's reception in East and West Germany after the war and the role she came to play in the Federal Republic as a representative 'Poet of Reconciliation'. The study then situates Sachs' work within the framework of the debate surrounding the representation of the Holocaust by means of a thorough exposition of the aporia at the heart of Theodor Adorno's writings on post-Holocaust art. It demonstrates by close reading how Sachs' work is itself marked by this aporetic struggle and exposes in particular the aesthetic means by which Sachs renders this aporetic tension legible in her poetry through her use of, for example, prosopopoeia, her recasting of traditional metaphors and her reversal of biblical archetypes. The primary question addressed is whether Sachs' poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of the often fragmented nature of her writing. In particular, the author confronts those critics who see in Sachs' work elements of consolation, reconciliation, or redemption in a transcendental realm, in favour of a reading that regards her work as permeated with the concrete events of the Holocaust and irreconcilably opposed to any notion of a religious sense-making and redemptive paradigm.

Listening to poets read their work focuses critical attention on the craft of the poem, while raising questions about the relationship between social history, technology, and the poet's "voice." "Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell" offers an analysis of a wide range of recordings, from commercial and amateur, to official studio sessions, to ephemeral events captured on reel-to-reel tape. Through the mid-century performances of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton, Derek Furr draws penetrating new conclusions about how and why poetry was recorded in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The conception happened on March 1 2005. The moment he realized he was pregnant with knowledge he ran to a piece of paper and used a red ink pen to see the results. After fifteen minutes J.L. Kirkwood realized that not only was he about to be a parent, he was about to give birth to words. He had morning sickness trying to figure out a way to bring poetry into the communities. He wanted to marry spoken word and bring written word into your living room. He wanted to give life to a book that would be thought provoking and timeless. A book that would bring about change. A concept that would create a balance between love and hate, trust and pain. He struggles with growth but admits his flaws and battles with the forces of darkness to become a better man. And after months of labor pains he finally gives birth to a healthy newborn. French Kiss, The Art To Poetic Lovemaking.The Masterpiece The most controversial poet in Hip-Hop explains his side....... J.L. Kirkwood has more than raised my love for Spoken Word artistry, he has also raised the bar for the art itself... His ability to bring life, and passion through the art of poetry has made me to label him, The Quintessential Spoken Word Genius!!!! "French Kiss deserves praise." -Chicago's #1 radio station WGCI personality Chris Michaels- J.L. Kirkwood Proves that success is in the Journey, not the destination. -BET Comicview Darius Bradford- "French Kiss is true and indeed a Masterpiece for the literary world.....His fine craft and smooth delivery sort of wakes you up and leaves everlasting thoughts on your mind for the rest of the day." -Soul Purpose Reviews- "J.L. Kirkwood uses a pen as a paintbrush to draw his almost scary real worlddepicted images of his triumphs and regrets. French Kiss exposes the open wound in our communities that only our efforts can heal" -CEO, Executive Director of Peace Journey..Jeannette Kravitz

"Philip Larkin, one of England's greatest and most popular twentieth-century poets, is nonetheless widely regarded as a misanthropic, provincial recluse. This volume re-examines that critical view and argues that Larkin's poetry, far from demonstrating his misanthropy, highlights his profound awareness of and concern for readers"--Provided by publisher.

A significant modern biography of the Italian master.

In a unique collection of essays devoted to one of America's most significant twentieth-century poets, a group of international contributors considers the Transatlantic nature of Stevens' poetry, providing original accounts of how a poet wary of 'influence' created a poetics which continues to haunt contermporary verse.

This book deals with editing Yeats' poems and is a companion to the revised edition of W.B.Yeats "The Poems - A New Edition". It outlines the complex problems facing an editor of Yeats' poetry and explains the solutions adopted in the new text. Manuscript materials are drawn on extensively, including some which have recently come to light in the Scribner archives at the Univeristy of Texas and at Princeton University. Compared with the first edition of this volume, there is an additional chapter on the order of the poems as well as new information on the Scribner edition and other revisions throughout.;Richard Finneran is the editor of "Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies".

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory is the most comprehensive collection of poetry from the period ever published. Included are generous selections from the work of all major poets, and a representation of the work of virtually every poet of significance, from Thomas Ashe at the beginning of the era to Charlotte Mew at its end. The work of Victorian women poets features very prominently, with extensive selections not only from canonical poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, but also from poets such as Augusta Webster for which high claims have recently been made by critics. The anthology reflects (and will contribute to) the ongoing reassessment of the canon that is central to English Studies today; in all, sixty-six poets are represented. The editors have included complete works wherever feasible - including the complete texts of Tennyson's In Memoriam and of a number of other long poems. A headnote by the editors introduces the work of each poet, and each selection has been newly annotated. The inclusion of twenty-five selections of the poetic theory from the period is an important feature rounding out the anthology. This anthology is also available in a concise edition.

Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Through her letters and poems, Richard E. Brantley identifies Dickinson's dialogue with John Locke's rational empiricism, Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology, Wordsworth's 'natural methodism, ' Ralph Waldo Emerson's idealism, and European and American intellectual traditions. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries.