This work provides a comprehensive account of the life and writings of Andrew Marvell (1621-78), as well as the reception of his work in the century after his death. A much-loved poet, a compelling controversialist, and once famous as a member of Parliament, Marvell's intersecting careers are here explored in detail. His biography is transformed with wide reference to print and manuscript sources, many of which are described for the first time in this useful resource for any student, historian, literary scholar or general reader interested in the life and works of this great writer.

This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new avenues into Keats's poems and letters, including a valuable introduction to "the responsible poet." Focusing on Keats's sense of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in comparison with Eliot's treatment of similar subjects; "The Eve of St. Agnes" by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem an addendum outlining a bold new reading; "Lamia" by focusing on its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot, poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats's successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas, accentuating the image of him as "the responsible poet."

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.

Ezra Pound was deeply engaged with the avant-garde art scene in London and Paris during the early twentieth century. The effects of this engagement were not restricted to experiments in poetic form, however; they directly shaped Pound's social and political thought. In this book Rebecca Beasley tracks Pound's education in visual culture in chapters that explore Pound's early poetry in the context of American aestheticism and middle-class education; imagism, anarchism and post-impressionist painting; vorticism and anti-democracy in early drafts of The Cantos; Dadaist conceptual art, internationalism and Pound's turn to Italian fascism. In establishing a critical vocabulary profoundly indebted to the visual arts, Pound laid the basis for a literary modernism that is, paradoxically, a visual culture. Drawing on unpublished archive materials and little known magazine contributions, this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pound's intellectual development and the relationship between modernist literature and the visual arts.

Literature and Complaint in England 1272-1553 gives an entirely new and original perspective on the relations between early judicial process and the development of literature in England. Wendy Scase argues that texts ranging from political libels and pamphlets to laments of the unrequited lover constitute a literature shaped by the new and crucial role of complaint in the law courts. She describes how complaint took on central importance in the development of institutions such as Parliament and the common law in later medieval England, and argues that these developments shaped a literature of complaint within and beyond the judicial process. She traces the story of the literature of complaint from the earliest written bills and their links with early complaint poems in English, French, and Latin, through writings associated with political crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to the libels and petitionary pamphlets of Reformation England. A final chapter, which includes analyses of works by Chaucer, Hoccleve, and related writers, proposes far-reaching revisions to current histories of the arts of composition in medieval England. Throughout, close attention is paid to the forms and language of complaint writing and to the emergence of an infrastructure for the production of plaint texts, and many images of plaints and petitions are included. The texts discussed include works by well-known authors as well as little-known libels and pamphlets from across the period.

Die bundel, wat in P.J. Philander se nege-en-tagtigste jaar verskyn het, is geskryf terwyl hy in New York gewoon het. Ten spyte van die afstand tussen die digter en sy geboorteland, spreek die gedigte in die bundel steeds van 'n intieme verbintenis tussen hom en sy land van herkoms. In die middel van die winter word Miem Fischer saam met haar enigste seun en ander familielede weggevoer van hulle plaas naby Ermelo: eers na die konsentrasiekamp by Standerton en daarna na die kamp by Merebank naby Durban. In haar dagboekinskrywings ontvou dag na dag die aangrypende verhaal van hoe sy die haglike realiteit van lewe in ’n konsentrasiekamp moet verduur. Tant Miem Fischer se kampdagboek is een van maar ’n handjievol dagboeke wat die lyding van Boerevroue en -kinders van dag tot dag weergee en wat na die oorlog behoue gebly het.

This is an exploration of new aspects of Blake's work using the concept of incarnation and drawing on theories of contemporary digital media. Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative. Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and images, the incarnation of words in material books and their copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and the incarnation of spirit in matter.

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.

"Temporal Circumstances" provides powerful and detailed interpretations of the most important and challenging of the "Canterbury Tales." Well-informed and clearly written, this book will interest both those familiar with Chaucer's masterpiece and readers new to it.

The pre-modern Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj (941-1001) left an indelible mark on the trajectory of pre-modern Arabic poetry and culture by pioneering and popularizing a new mode of poetry, sukhf - obscene and scatological parody. His outrageously obscene poetry was admired by his contemporaries, as well by poets and critics of later periods. The modern period, however, has not been nearly as kind to Ibn al-Hajjaj. Sinan Antoon argues that the reasons for this oversight are ideological, for the most part, and have to do with modern misconceptions of what constitutes "good poetry." The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry is the first study of this fascinating poet and the genre he popularized, placing it within Arab cultural genealogy. Antoon reinscribes Ibn al-Hajjaj into the literary history from which he has been exiled and offers fascinating close readings of the poems in their social and cultural context.

Examining carefully the Egyptian epic hexameter production from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD, especially that of the southern region (Thebaid), this study provides an image of three centuries in the history of the Graeco-Egyptian literature, in which authors and poetry are related directly to the social-economic, cultural and literary contexts from which they come. The training they could get and the books and authors they came in touch with explain that we know so many names and works, written in a language and metrics that enjoyed the greatest esteem, being considered proofs of the highest culture. Laura Miguelez Cavero demonstrates that the traditional image of a "school of Nonnos" is not justified - rather, Triphiodorus, Nonnus, Musaeus, Colluthus, Cyrus of Panopolis and Christodorus of Coptos are just the tip of a literary iceberg we know only to some extent through the texts that papyri offer us.

New York School Collaborations gathers ten new essays from a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars on the alliances and artistic co-productions of New York School poets, painters, musicians, and film-makers. Ranging from conceptual theatre to visual poetry, from experimental film to avant-garde opera, the New York School has explored the possibilities of collaboration like no other group of American poets. Considering relationships between words and images, words and sounds, and words and bodies, these essays shed light on the dialogues between artists and the communities their work continues to produce.

Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, "How To Read A Poem" is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader.

Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content.
Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis.
Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and many more.
Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.

In searching for a definitive concept of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the fate god, squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire. The first section of the book explores the essence of man in the black world of survival. The second, and main section, seeks to develop a concept of drama in black theatre (in African and the New World experience) from the point of view of Esu-Elegbara. The text is highlighted by various illustrations. Three tables outline the Agents of Satire: Imprecator; Imprecator/Satirist; and Satirist/Agent. A bibliography, notes, and an index will help the scholar who wishes to further explore this rich and complex subject. The book is a sophisticated study that will be of great interest to students seeking to understand African influences on black culture today. Potential markets for the book include university-level black history, literature, or culture studies. A broader market might be found among theatre practitioners and students of modern drama.

Despite Milton's preoccupation with origins - he depicts the birth of the first man and the first woman, the first utterance, the first interpretation, the first law, the first home, the first exile - these elude him. His creation stories are always mediated, by accounts and accounts of accounts. Even the creation of the universe is not depicted as a single event that occurred once and for all time in a distant past; instead, world-order must be perpetually reasserted, before the ever present threat of chaos. That description of Milton's universe also applies to his other creation, the poem, where the chaos that forever threatens is the abyss of interpretation. Milton's creations are not asserted despite this threat, but because of it; that is, chaos does not simply threaten to undo order, for chaos inheres in it. While Milton's inability to discover a privileged origin allies him with postmodernism - and so this study engages thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Lacan - that insight is far more ancient. According to Regina Schwartz, the Bible offers Milton his pattern of repeated beginnings.

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England investigates the relationship between the development of parliament and the practice of English poetry in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this period, the bureaucratic political culture of parliamentarians, clerks, and scribes overlapped with the artistic practice of major poets like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, all of whom had strong ties to parliament. Matthew Giancarlo investigates these poets together in the specific context of parliamentary events and controversies, as well as in the broader environment of changing constitutional ideas. Two chapters provide fresh analyses of the parliamentary ideologies that developed from the thirteenth century onward, and four chapters investigate the parliamentary aspects of each poet, as well as the later Lancastrian imitators of Langland. This study demonstrates the importance of the changing parliamentary environs of late medieval England and their centrality to the early growth of English narrative and lyric forms.

He argues that the best poetry that came out of the 1939-45 war, while very different from the work of Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, and their contemporaries, is in no sense inferior. It also has different matters to consider. War in the air, war at sea, war beyond Europe, the politics of Empire, democratic accountability - these are no subjects to be found in the poetry of the Great War. Nor is sex. Nor did American poets have much to say about that war, whereas the Americans Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, and Louis Simpson, are among the greatest English-speaking poets of World War Two. Both Hecht and Simpson write about the Holocaust and its aftermath, as do the English poets, Lotte Kramer and Gerda Mayer. For these reasons among others, Englishspeaking poetry of the Second World War deserves to be valued as work of unique importance.

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.

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.