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.

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be an influential poet of the early 20th century. In this study Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats' significance as founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the 20th century.

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.

Considered by many to be the most innovative British Marxist writer of the twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29. Although already a published writer of aeronautic texts and crime fiction, he was practically unknown to the public until reviews appeared of Illusion and Reality, which was published just after his death. A strikingly original study of poetry's role, it explained in clear language how the organising of emotion in society plays a part in social change and development. Caudwell had a powerful interest in how things worked - aeronautics, physics, human psychology, language and society. In the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s he saw that capitalism was a system that could not work properly and distorted the thinking of the age. Self-educated from the age of 15, he wrote with a directness that is quite alien to most cultural theory. Culture as Politics introduces Caudwell's work through his most accessible and relevant writing. Material will be drawn from Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and his essay 'Heredity and Development'.

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.

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

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.    

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.

"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.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

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.

The real test of Abram s historical explanations is of course whether or not they work whether, when we apply the criteria of correspondence and coherence (Just as in interpreting a poem), they make sense out of the particulars at hand and produce useful generalizations even in the face of competing historical interpretations. Abrams work continues to hold up. Jack Stillinger"

"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.

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.

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.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

"Reading Mark Strand "is a thorough reading and critical assessment of the key developments in the career of one of America's most important living poets. Geared toward readers and teachers of modern poetry, this study is attentive to the uniquely Strandian poetics; yet in charting the progression of one poetic career, it provides a methodology for assessing others. It meticulously examines Strand's evolution, paying particular attention to the later developments in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's corpus. While espousing phenomenological ideals, Nicosia elucidates the vital elements of the Strand poem, defines the poet's vision and addresses the poet's overarching concern: "What can a poem do?"