"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.

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".

A significant modern biography of the Italian master.

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.

Described as the "fifth gospel" because of its evangelical purpose, this spiritual autobiography creates a world in which reason and faith have transformed moral and social chaos into order. It is one of the most important works in the literature of Western Europe and is considered the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages.

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.

The loss of a baby is perhaps the most tragic thing that can happen to a person; for some only the unique qualities of poetry can fully capture the expressions of grief. These poignant and sensitive poems, all by bereaved mothers and fathers, give consoling affirmations for anyone who has suffered a pregnancy loss or disappointment. Marion Cohen is a poet, writer, mathemetician, teacher, wife, and mother. She has had several books published and is a consulting editor for Mothering.

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.

Although haiku is well known throughout the world, few outside Japan are familiar with its precursor, haikai (comic linked verse). Fewer still are aware of the role played by the Chinese Daoist classics in turning haikai into a respected literary art form. Basho and the Dao examines the haikai poets' adaptation of Daoist classics, particularly the Zhuangzi, in the seventeenth century and the eventual transformation of haikai from frivolous verse to high poetry. The author analyzes haikai's encounter with the Zhuangzi through its intertextual relations with the works of Basho and other major haikai poets, and also the nature and characteristics of haikai that sustained the Zhuangzi's relevance to haikai poetic construction. She demonstrates how the haikai poets' interest in this Daoist work was rooted in the intersection of deconstructing and reconstructing the classical Japanese poetic tradition. Well versed in both Chinese and Japanese scholarship, Qiu explores the significance of Daoist ideas in Basho's and others' conceptions of haikai. Her method involves an extensive hermeneutic reading of haikai texts, an in-depth analysis of the connection between Chinese and Japanese poetic terminology, and a comparison of Daoist traits in both traditions. The result is a penetrating study of key ideas that have been instrumental in defining and rediscovering the poetic essence of haikai verse. Basho and the Dao adds to an increasingly vibrant area of academic inquiry - the complex literary and cultural relations between Japan and China in the early modern era. Researchers and students of East Asian literature, philosophy, and cultural criticism will find this book a valuable contribution to cross-cultural literary studies and comparative aesthetics.

Today's Latino poetry scene is bursting at the seams. While Latino poetry has played an important role in establishing Latino letters, surprisingly only a few scholars have spent time analyzing its form. The first of its kind, Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry pulls back the curtain on how the poets Julia Alvarez, Rhina Espaillat, Rafael Campo, and C. Dale Young use formal structures such as meter, rhyme, and line break to affect our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about the world we inhabit. With original interviews, this imaginative book explores how these poets add something to reality with their creations.

Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

This book by one of the preeminent Virgil scholars of our day is the first comprehensive study of ekphrasis in Virgil's final masterpiece, the Aeneid. Virgil uses ekphrasis-a self-contained aside that generates a pause in the narrative to describe a work of art or other object-to tell us something about the grander text in which it is embedded, says Michael C. J. Putnam. Individually and as a group, Virgil's ekphrases enrich the reader's understanding of the meaning of the epic. Putnam shows how the descriptions of works of art, and of people, places, and even animals, provide metaphors for the entire poem and reinforce its powerful ambiguities. Putnam offers insightful analyses of the most extensive and famous ekphrases in the Aeneid-the paintings in Juno's temples in Carthage, the Daedalus frieze, and the shield of Aeneas. He also considers shorter and less well known examples-the stories of Ganymede, the Trojan shepherd swept into the sky by an amorous Jupiter; the fifty daughters of Danaus, ordered by their father to kill their husbands on their wedding night; and Virgil's original tale of a domesticated wild stag whose killing sparks a war between Trojans and Italians. These ekphrases incorporate major themes of the Aeneid, an enduring formative text of the Western tradition, and provide a rich variety of interpretive perspectives on the poem.

Juan Ruiz's "Libro de Buen Amor" (1330/1343) is a lively and challenging medieval classic that ranks alongside the works of Dante and Chaucer. This volume is the first to systematically approach the role of humor in the "Libro de Buen Amor "through the treatment of the body, the visual, and the representation of first-person protagonist as lover. Haywood examines the place of the bawdy and the grotesque in the "Libro de Buen Amor" in relation to secular and sacred culture. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars and students interested in humor, cultural domains, medieval studies, and Spanish studies.

Writing Celebrity is divided into three major sections. The first part traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on "literary" writing in the decades before World War II. The second two sections of the book demonstrate the relevance of celebrity for literary scholarship by re-evaluating the careers of two major American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

Long ago I A Richards remarked that if we are to understand the Imagination, we have to understand how the brain works. Scientists have begun to approach this deep and complex problem in ways that we can not ignore. Coleridge's ideas on the subject belong to another age, but he had the knack of raising questions and performing thought experiments which are still relevant. This book explores the questions and discoveries raised both by Coleridge and by recent scientific research in order to offer fresh and original approaches to the reading of poetry and in particular the reading of Coleridge's major poems, The Ancyent Marinere, Kubla Khan and Christabel. This book offers an interpretation of the role of Imagination in the development of the human consciousness and the vital role poetry plays in our engagement with the world.

In this first book-length study of Stevie Smith, Romana Huk reassesses the work of this major twentieth-century woman writer as emerging not only from the practices of female literary modernism, but also from within the tumultuous cultural context of mid-century Europe. Huk considers both the poems and the novels in the light of their cultural and literary context. Amongst the work treated here is Smith's rarely discussed trilogy of novels: Novel on Yellow Paper , Over the Frontier and The Holiday .

This book re-evaluates the perception of "courtly love" in Old French verse. Adams traces how these verses explore the emotional trials of "amour" and propose coping methods for the lovelorn.

Exploring the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and personal identity in Larkin's work, this book gives close and original readings of three major poems ('Here', 'Livings' and 'Aubade'), and two neglected but important themes (Larkin and the supernatural, Larkin and Flaubert).

This book provides provocative information on poetry written in response to the most revolutionary set of events seen in Britain since the 1640s: "Peterloo," a peaceful protest that became a massacre; "Cato Street," a government scripted rebellion; and the "Queen Caroline Controversy," when the estranged wife of George IV tried to claim her crown.

This book explores Sara Coleridge's critical intelligence and theoretical reach. It shows her in various critical guises: editing works by her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting on her own poetry and prose, and writing diversely brilliant criticism of classical and English literature.

At the center of Hardy's aesthetic practice is the recognition of desire as a necessary and fundamental condition of human existence. Yearning, disappointment, frustration and loss determine the relationship of his characters and poetic personae to the world and the systems in which their sense of self is expressed and constituted. Yet his work also explores the positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire. Structured around the themes of home and homelessness; eroticism; Poor Men, Ladies and social aspiration; the transgressivity of cross dressing; the creation of "sapphic spaces;" aesthetic desire and its fulfilment in the achieved work of art, Thomas Hardy and Desire demonstrates Hardy's commitment, as an artist in pursuit of "a way to the better," to exploring how the energy of desire pushes beyond the boundaries of class, sexuality, gender and even language itself to bring new ways of being and doing into the realm of knowledge.