The Second World War has shaped the modern world more than any other single event. This generous and haunting selection of English-language and translated poems includes verse written by servicemen who participated in the war - Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Randall Jarrell - as well as by survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust - Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan - and civilians across Europe and beyond. It features work by important women poets - Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Anna Akhmatova - exiles such as W. H. Auden and Berthold Brecht, and writers reporting from London, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow and New York, dealing with the terrifying impact and legacy of the conflict. Presented with a historical critical introduction and biographical notes, the result is a vital lyric testimony to the tragic global theatre of the war.

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic ""myths"" of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, ""The Monstrous Debt"" argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers. Among the questions asked by this volume are: How does Blake's graphic mythology submit to ""redemptive translations"" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might Ted Hughes' strong readings of a ""snaky"" Coleridge illuminate the ""mercurial"" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley ""sustain"" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with supplies of ""imaginative oxygen""? In what ways does Keats enable Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does ""cockney"" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman's poetry out of kitsch into something new and strange? ""The Monstrous Debt"" seeks to broaden our sense of what ""influence"" is by defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era will enjoy this informative volume.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

Screen Memories/Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood/Family Romances/Creative Writers and Daydreaming/The Uncanny

Freud was fascinated by the mysteries of creativity and the imagination. The major pieces collected here explore the vivid but seemingly trivial childhood memories that often ‘screen’ far more uncomfortable desires; the links between literature and daydreaming – and our intensely mixed feelings about things we experience as ‘uncanny’.

His insights into the roots of artistic expression in the triangular ‘family romances’ (of father, mother and infant) that so dominate our early lives, and the parallels between our own memories and desires and the tormented career of a genius like Leonardo, reveal the artistry of Freud’s own writing. And his celebrated study of Leonardo, Freud’s first exercise in psycho-biography, brilliantly uses a single memory to reveal the childhood conflicts behind both Leonardo’s remarkable achievements and his striking eccentricity.

General Editor: Adam Phillips

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‘Contrariwise … if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic’

‘I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole … without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,’ wrote Charles Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one ‘golden afternoon’ in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a disordered tea-party; and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles, paradoxes and riddles, are poignant moments of elegiac nostalgia for lost childhood. Startlingly original and experimental, the Alice books provide readers with a double window on both child and adult worlds.

This is the most comprehensively annotated edition available and includes the manuscript version of Alice’s Adventures Underground and Carroll’s essay ‘”Alice” on the Stage’ written for The Theatre in 1887.

Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is displaced from as much as grounded in his native country. From prodigious beginnings to prolific maturity, he has been, through thick and thin, through troubled times and other, a writer profoundly committed to the art of poetry and the craft of making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse, but a work of art never finished.
This virtuoso study by Hugh Haughton provides the most comprehensive account imaginable of Mahon's oeuvre. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on almost every page. The poetry, its revisions and reception, are the subject here, but so thorough is the approach that what is offered also amounts indirectly to an intellectual biography of the poet and with it an account of Northern Irish poetry vital to our understanding of the times.

Freud was fascinated by the mysteries of creativity and the imagination. The groundbreaking works that comprise The Uncanny present some of his most influential explorations of the mind. In these pieces Freud investigates the vivid but seemingly trivial childhood memories that often "screen" deeply uncomfortable desires; the links between literature and daydreaming; and our intensely mixed feelings about things we experience as "uncanny." Also included is Freud's celebrated study of Leonardo Da Vinci—his first exercise in psychobiography.

Volume One of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1988, covered the period from Eliot's childhood in St Louis, Missouri, to the end of 1922, by which time he had settled in England, married and published The Waste Land. Since 1988, Valerie Eliot has continued to gather materials from collections, libraries and private sources in Britain and America, towards the preparation of subsequent volumes of the Letters edition. Among new letters to have come to light, a good many date from the years 1898-1922, which has necessitated a revised edition of Volume One, taking account of approximately two hundred newly discovered items of correspondence. The new letters fill crucial gaps in the record, notably enlarging our understanding of the genesis and publication of The Waste Land. Valuable, too, are letters from the earlier and less documented part of Eliot's life, which have been supplemented by additional correspondence from family members in America.

The marginalisation of John Clare, despite renewed interest in Romanticism and the literature of madness, is still an enigma. Perhaps more than any other poet of the period, Clare has never found the contexts in which his poetry can be read. This important collection of new critical essays locates Clare's work from diverse points of view, identifying the obstacles to his reception as a major poet. It includes chapters on landscape and botany, Clare's politics, his madness, Clare and the critics, and a remarkable essay by Seamus Heaney on Clare's importance as a poetic precursor. This volume will be a landmark in the history of his reception, revealing the ways in which an appreciation of this unique poet revises the canon of Romantic and Victorian literature.

The marginalisation of John Clare, despite renewed interest in Romanticism and the literature of madness, is still an enigma. Perhaps more than any other poet of the period, Clare has never found the contexts in which his poetry can be read. This important collection of new critical essays locates Clare's work from diverse points of view, identifying the obstacles to his reception as a major poet. It includes chapters on landscape and botany, Clare's politics, his madness, Clare and the critics, and a remarkable essay by Seamus Heaney on Clare's importance as a poetic precursor. This volume will be a landmark in the history of his reception, revealing the ways in which an appreciation of this unique poet revises the canon of Romantic and Victorian literature.

"Volume One: 1898-1922" presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published "The Waste Land." Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War.

"Volume Two: 1923-1925" covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of "The Criterion," publication of "The Hollow Men," and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence of this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.