Originally published in 1990, this book contains the full text and translation of razos and troubadour songs. The coupling of the razos and songs in this edition is based on the conviction that though the lyrics should first be read on their own, it is highly instructive to read the two together, as the razo authors intended. This allows the reader to attempt to read as a thirteenth-century contemporary might have.

Originally published in 1988, this book is a complete translation of The Byelorussian Tristan, alongside textual notes.

Originally published in 1988, this book is a complete translation of The Byelorussian Tristan, alongside textual notes.

Originally published in 1990, this book contains the full text and translation of razos and troubadour songs. The coupling of the razos and songs in this edition is based on the conviction that though the lyrics should first be read on their own, it is highly instructive to read the two together, as the razo authors intended. This allows the reader to attempt to read as a thirteenth-century contemporary might have.

Photographs By Karel Plicka, Josef Sudek And Jindrich Marco.

Photographs By Karel Plicka, Josef Sudek And Jindrich Marco.

In the vast diversity of Western civilization, poetry has traditions both national and international that span three millennia. To write a coherent critical history of even just lyric poetry would be perhaps beyond human powers, by in his essays Lowry Nelson finds it possible to take soundings--in great epochs of inventiveness and of changing sensibility; in the extremes of expressivity; in the reader's varying fictive role--while setting in appropriate contexts works of such poets as Horace, the early Troubadors, St. John of the Cross, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Each essay has a different scope and emphasis within the apparently limitless range of possibilities. Nelson's arrangement of the essays is chronological, though only roughly so; many issues and examples could be explored in other contexts. Yet there is a presiding view of literature that is commonly designated as comparative, stressing some degree of universality; poets happily transgress frontiers and barriers; one tradition absorbs others in its own way, as in the poetics of Roman and medieval Latin, the Provensals, Petrarch and Petrarchism, Symbolism, and Modernism. Nelson observes only one restriction. He concentrates on lyric poetry, although much that he examines can be applied to other forms.