This book explores poetry and pedagogy in practice across the lifespan. Poetry is directly linked to improved literacy, creativity, personal development, emotional intelligence, complex analytical thinking and social interaction: all skills that are crucial in contemporary educational systems. However, a narrow focus on STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities has led educators to deprioritize poetry and to overlook its interdisciplinary, multi-modal potential. The editors and contributors argue that poetry is not a luxury, but a way to stimulate linguistic experiences that are formally rich and cognitively challenging. To learn through poetry is not just to access information differently, but also to forge new and different connections that can serve as reflective tools for lifelong learning. This interdisciplinary book will be of value to teachers and students of poetry, as well as scholars interested in literacy across the disciplines.

"This book narrates the first national celebration of united Italy, the Sixth Centenary of Dante Alighieri in May 1865. Denominated alternatively as a national, European, and secular festa, the affair materialized as an eclectic Italian monument with extraordinary political, social and cultural significance. The Centenary was a platform upon which an alternative definition of Italian identity emerged, one based on a Florentine cultural nationalism that opposed the Savoyard territorial nationalism. An stunningly popular event celebrated throughout Italian civil society, the festa was conceived, organized, and strategically promoted from a municipal center, the city of Florence. Its Florentine organizers successfully wrote the story of the Centenary as a parable of the Florentine son, Dante, who fathered the Italian nation as well as king Victor Emmanuel himself"--

John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience. Exploring new directions in the study of Brown's life and work, After Winter is structured around the following three features: (1) new and previously published essays that sum up contemporary approaches to the multifaceted works that Brown created in a variety of genres; (2) interviews with Brown's acquaitances and contemporaries that articulate his unique aesthetic vision and communicate his importance as a scholar, creative writer, and teacher; and (3) a discography of source material that innovatively extends the study and teaching of Brown's acclaimed poetry, especially his Southern Road, focusing on recordings of folk materials relevant to the subject matter, style, and meaning of individual poems from his oeuvre.

This companion volume to James Thomson's The Seasons completes the Oxford English Texts edition of his works and provides for the first time a critical text of all the poems with commentary.

Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Observations on their Poetry By Samuel Johnson Originally published circa 1880. A discussion on the lives of fifty two of the most eminent English poets with critical observations on their works. Also added is "the Preface to Shakespeare" and the review of "The Origin of Evil." Includes a sketch of Johnson's life by Sir Walter Scott. Many of the earliest poetry books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

"The Radical Spaces of Poetry" introduces a diverse range of experimental writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It examines the political, social and cultural implications of some of the most exciting and dynamic work of recent years, and the ways it produces discursive spaces for radical social and political perspectives.

Relatively little critical attention has been directed towards the explication of James Merrill's difficult poems, much less towards the understanding of his densely-layered symbolism. This is the first comprehensive study to look at Merrill's difficult symbolic system and to provide a close reading of Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Adams reads Merrill's poetry through various lenses, primarily those of Freudian psychology and of the Jungian archetypal system. His approach allows the reader to view individual works as part of the larger picture of Merrill's quest to save his life through his art.

This comprehensive guide to the poetry and letters of John Keats offers a highly readable and detailed textual analysis of the themes and techniques of his work. Blades assesses all the major writing - including the narratives and the great odes - and goes on to examine the context of the verse through a survey of the poet's letters and an examination of the key features of nineteenth century Romanticism. This lively and imaginative study concludes with a discussion of some of the most influential critical responses to Keats's work.

This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

In this book White "traces the influence of both the comedies and tragedies {of Shakespeare} on Keats's work." (Choice)

Charles Bukowski was a product of the small press movement, an unparalleled phenomenon in the so-called little magazines that proliferated in the United States during the 60s. His long journey through the 'littles' and the small presses was finally rewarded after bitter battles in the back alleys of the American literary scene. This critical study offers a comprehensive picture of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career. Abel Debritto draws on archives, privately held, unpublished work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.

This book is a thorough, eco-critical re-evaluation of Lord Byron (1789-1824), claiming him as one of the most important ecological poets in the British Romantic tradition. Using political ecology, post-humanist theory, new materialism, and ecological science, the book shows that Byron's major poems-Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the metaphysical dramas, and Don Juan-are deeply engaged with developing a cultural ecology that could account for the co-creative synergies in human and natural systems, and ground an emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics scaled to address globalized human threats to socio-environmental thriving in the post-Waterloo era. In counterpointing Byron's eco-cosmopolitanism to the localist dwelling praxis advocated by Romantic Lake poets, Byron's Nature seeks to enlarge our understanding of the extraordinary range, depth, and importance of Romanticism's inquiry into the meaning of nature and our ethical relation to it.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

This study examines several unexplored aspects of Robert Frost’s poetry—proverbs, riddles, and names—and shows how they contribute to the reader's experience. Timothy D. O'Brien argues that while they often shape Frost’s poems as sites of inviting wisdom and play, these features also open up the poems to radical doubt about identity, authorship, and reality. This book offers the most extensive research to date of the relationship between Frost’s poetry and the visual art that often accompanied it and sheds new light on the work of one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded poets.    

"Blake's Night Thoughts" discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking "night" as the breakdown of rational progressive thought and of thought based on concepts of identity, the book reads the lyric poetry, some Prophetic works, including a chapter on "The Four Zoas," the illustrations to Young, and Dante, and looks at Blake's writing of madness.

ILLUSION AND REALITY A STUDY OF THE SOURCES OF POETRY By CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE INTRODUCTION THE BIRTH OF POETRY THE DEATH OF MYTHOLOGY THE INVOLVMENT OF MODERN POETRY ENGLISH POETS: I PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION II THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION III DECLINE OF CAPITALISM THE WORLD THE PHANTASY POETRYS DREAMWORK THE ARTS THE FUTURE OF POETRY..... BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THIS is one of the great books of our time. It is not easy reading. It is a book to be studied and annotated and returned to again and again. The reader will then find that, however often he takes it up, it will always give him fresh food for thought. The author, Christopher St. John Sprigg, was born in Putney on October 20, 1907. He was educated at the Benedictine school at Ealing. He left school at sixteen and a half and worked for three years as a reporter on the Yorkshire Observer. Then he returned to London and joined a firm of aeronautical publishers, first as editor and later as a director. He invented an infinitely variable gear, the designs for which were published in the Automobile Engineer. They attracted a good deal of attention from experts. He published five textbooks on aero nautics, seven detective novels, and some poems and short stories. All this before he was twentyfive. In May, 1935, under the name of Christopher Caudwell, he published his first serious novel, This My Hand. It shows that lie had made a close study of psychology, but he had not yet succeeded in relating his knowledge to life. At the end of 1934 he had come across some of the Marxist classics, and the following summer he spent in Cornwall immersed in the works of Marx, Engcls, and Lenin, Shortly after hisreturn to London he finished the first draft of Illusion and Reality. Then, in December, he took lodgings in Poplar and later joined the Poplar Branch of the Communist Party. Many of his Poplar comrades were dockers, almost aggressively proletarian, and a little suspicious at first of the, quiet, well spoken young man who wrote books for a living out before long he was accepted as one of themselves, doing his share of whatever had to be done. A few months after joining the Party he went over to Paris to get a firsthand experience of the Popular Front and he came back with renewed energy and enthusiasm. Besides continuing to write novels for a living, he rewrote Illusion and Reality, completed . the essays published subsequently as Studies in a Dying Culture, and began The. Crisis in Physics. He worked to the clock. After spending the day at his typewriter, he would leave the house at five and go out to the Branch to speak at an openair meeting, or sell the Daily Worker at the corner of Crisp Street Market. . Meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War had broken out. The Poplar Branch threw itself into the campaign, with Caudwell as one of the leading spirits. By November they had raised enough money to buy an ambulance, and Caudwell was chosen to drive it across France.

Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis's memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the page in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and 40s. After growing up Jewish in the Bronx, she was an atheist, then a practitioner of Dianetics; she converted to Christianity after experiencing a moment of transcendent grace. A mother, a novelist, a vibrant and difficult and intelligent woman, she set off for England in 1952, determined to captivate the man whose work had changed her life. Davidman became the intellectual and spiritual partner Lewis never expected but cherished. She helped him refine his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and to write his novel Till We Have Faces. Their relationship-begun when Joy wrote to Lewis as a religious guide-grew from a dialogue about faith, writing, and poetry into a deep friendship and a timeless love story.

A survey of poetry from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain and the USA. The five chapters of the book cover the 1950s, 1960s, the early troubles period to 1976, the 1980s and 1990s. Each poet is placed firmly within his or her historical and social contexts, with an emphasis on the response to the processes of modernisation, the representation of violence, poetic form and gender. While the distinctiveness of Northern and Southern poetries is respected, Irish poets are seen to be engaged in a continual process of cross-border exchange. Over 30 individual poets are dealt with, and in each case detailed readings of individual poems are given along with contextual material. While the major critical issues are addressed the book is primarily concerned to break with the small canon of texts and poets which tends to dominate discussions of the subject, and emphasizes a heterogeneity and diversity of achievement. It avoids the imposition of a single interpretation on a diverse body of writing and makes the case for a wider appraisal of Irish poetry which considers international and mainstream influences. It concludes with a discussion of poetry of the diaspora at a time of the fragile Northern Ireland ceasefire and the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon in the Republic.

Exploring the work of William Blake within the context of Methodism - the largest 'dissenting' religious group during his lifetime - this book contributes to ongoing critical debates surrounding Blake's religious affinities by suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, Blake held sympathies with certain aspects of Methodism.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.