Probably the most famous of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies.
Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.

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.

It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie Boulton shows that it is possible to approach a poem from a business-like perspective without losing enjoyment. This reissue will be of particular value to students as well as those with a general interest in the specifics of poetry.

This work is the first academic biography of North Carolina poet laureate James Larkin Pearson (1879-1981). Using material from Pearson's personal archive in Wilkes County, from the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from contemporary examinations of his life and work, this study offers deeply personal insights into his life and provides extensive examinations of his hopes, joys, fears, pains, and sorrows. The work also includes lengthy studies of his poetry and his journalistic efforts and examines their place within the larger cultural milieu. In the process, the book addresses two themes that become apparent in Pearson's life and work: his Tar Heel spirit and his individualism. He was a fighter who overcame poverty, a poor education, personal tragedies, and professional neglect to achieve great success. He also abided by his own set of religious, artistic, and political values regardless of the consequences. This work thus offers the first personal and professional examination of James Larkin Pearson, provides insights on North Carolina and its people, and examines the benefits and drawbacks of following one's own path.

This book tackles the interpretative problem of "pleasure" in Keats's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured, and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard interpretation that attributes Keats's poetic development to his separation from Hunt, Mizukoshi argues that Keats, imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.

In this critical and historical interpretation of Petrarch's major Italian work, the collection of poems he called the Rerum vulgarium fagmenta, Peter Hainsworth presents Petrarch as a poet of outstanding sophistication and seriousness, occupied with issues which are still central to debates about poetry and language. In the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Petrarch reformed the received Italian tradition, creating a new kind of lyric poetry. In particular, he found solutions to the intellectual, linguistic and imaginative problems which Dante's Divine Comedy posed for the succeeding generation of poets. Petrarch the Poet illumines the complexities of Petrarch's poetic vision, which is simultaneously a form of autobiographical narrative, a poetic encyclopaedia and a meditation on the nature of poetry. The book will appeal to Italian specialists, to those interested in European poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and also to readers interested generally in the nature and function of poetry.

This book is about Virgil's ideas of nature, landscape, history, and patriotism. It is also concerned with ideas of nature throughout antiquity and with the poetry and culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It combines a close reading of Virgil's texts with a broad vision of the revolution in Western sensibility they helped to effect.

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records--Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson, and many now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of material (including journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many fans.

"Constructing Chaucer "examines the scholarly appropriation and manipulation of Geoffrey Chaucer since his death in 1400 and seeks to enhance the theoretical dialogue on the famous author's reception history by challenging long-standing assumptions about the "Father of English Poetry." In response to the academy's recent disregard for the narrative persona-construct that was especially prominent in medieval literatures, this book offers a new and historically-based version of persona-theory and applies the paradigm to the reception of key texts where Chaucer's use of the persona is most acute. This method is centered upon the fresh concept of "autofiction," which is offered in order to recuperate and revitalize the persona as a critical tool. By applying the theory of autofiction to Chaucer's verse, Gust questions age-old traditions, presents a series of provocative new interpretations, and fosters a more complete understanding of the ideologies of Chaucer criticism.

"Rhetoric and Sexuality" explores the poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. Nickowitz combines a rhetorical and thematic interpretation, employing close readings and the critical lens of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis, to illustrate an additional way to read American poetry. He argues that the extent to which homosexual desire is problematic for these poets compels them to formulate new ways of expressing issues of homosexuality for which they have no available words. "Rhetoric and Sexuality" shows that the logic of identity in twentieth-century American poetry becomes a question of rhetoric.

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet’s social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of masculinity: the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers’ cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market’s function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.

Poetry is composed of sensation: this Deleuze-Guattarian assertion is central to a Deleuzian poetics that provides a fruitful approach to the difficulties of innovative literature and poetry in particular. This book is a clear exposition of a Deleuzian approach to literature that treats the literary text, particularly the poem, as something that exists in its own right. As such poetry is presented as something that must be encountered, actualised and embodied by readers on its own terms, rather than providing access to something else that it represents. Far from being a hermetic, ivory tower encounter, the Deleuzian poetics of experimental reading reveals sensational significances that are not only philosophical and social but political. What's more, through a close examination of a range of contemporary innovative poems, Jon Clay suggests that a Deleuzian way of reading offers a firm purchase on notoriously difficult texts, providing concepts and a language that aids their understanding.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the 'poetess', and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.

Wordsworth's classical education presents an amazing paradox: gifted teachers trained him in the full rigors of classical Latin and Greek, but his schoolmasters were committed to the Classics and to modern literature. Through them, Wordsworth developed a profound love for the Classics and thus an enlightened zeal for a new poetry, a poetry capable of being compared with and even daring to compete with the classical texts he so dearly loved. Richard Clancey's meticulously researched study presents new biographical information on Wordsworth's classical education and new facts about the education of his teachers.

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Helene Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fatima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Herica Valladares.

This volume explores the relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of "estrangement" is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

This study examines Hart Crane's canonical ambitions in "The Bridge" and argues for a new species of epic, "the modernist epic," which also includes Pound's "The Cantos," Eliot's "The Waste Land," and Williams's "Paterson." It offers a close reading of "The Bridge" as a hybrid of lyric and epic modes. Crane's sublime and history converge in a complex synthesis of form and ideas. The study reconceives Crane's achievement by locating him in an intertextual system of production while also recognizing his poetic making of self. Yet in this work Crane assumes a greater political presence than much commentary has entertained.

J.L. Bradley's chronology captures much of the drama and excitement of Shelley's life. This is an informative, often witty account which will be extremely valuable to all Shelley students, scholars and enthusiasts. A section on the Shelley circle is a particularly helpful supplement to the main body of the book.

The 1990s have witnessed a major reassessment of Blake initiated by a new and more rigorous comprehension of his modes of production, which in turn has led to re-evaluation of other literary and cultural contexts for his work. Blake in the Nineties grapples with the implications of the new bibliography for Blake studies, in its editorial, interpretative, and historical dimensions. As well as providing an international overview of recent Blake criticism, the collection contributes to current debates in a variety of disciplines dealing with the Romantic period, including art history, counter-Enlightenment-scholarship, theology and hermeneutic theory.

Traditionally, Wordsworth s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth s poetry, in Simpson s phrase, a poetry of displacement . "

A pioneering critic, educator, and poet, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) helped the English-speaking world decide not only what to read but how to read it. Acknowledged "father" of New Criticism, he produced the most systematic body of critical writing in the English language since Coleridge. His method of close reading dominated the English-speaking classroom for half a century. John Paul Russo draws on close personal acquaintance with Richards as well as on unpublished materials, correspondence, and interviews, to write the first biography (originally published in 1989) of one of last century's most influential and many-sided men of letters.