Shakespeare is a major influence on poets writing in English, but the dynamics of that influence in the twentieth century have never been as closely analysed as they are in this important study. More than an account of the ways in which Shakespeare is figured in both the poetry and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provocative new view of poetic interrelationship. Focusing on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Neil Corcoran uncovers the relationships - combative as well as sympathetic - between these poets themselves as they are intertwined in their engagements with Shakespeare. Corcoran offers many enlightening close readings, fully alert to contemporary theoretical debates. This original study of influence and reception beautifully displays the nature of poetic influence - both of Shakespeare on the twentieth century, and among modern poets as they respond to Shakespeare.

'Now I am alone,' says Hamlet before speaking a soliloquy. But what is a Shakespearean soliloquy? How has it been understood in literary and theatrical history? How does it work in screen versions of Shakespeare? What influence has it had? Neil Corcoran offers a thorough exploration and explanation of the origin, nature, development and reception of Shakespeare's soliloquies. Divided into four parts, the book supplies the historical, dramatic and theoretical contexts necessary to understanding, offers extensive and insightful close readings of particular soliloquies and includes interviews with eight renowned Shakespearean actors providing details of the practical performance of the soliloquy. A comprehensive study of a key aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic art, this book is ideal for students and theatre-goers keen to understand the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's unique use of the soliloquy.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer an up-to-date, stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.

Neil Corcoran's book is a major survey and interpretation of modern British poetry since 1940, offering a wealth of insights into poets and their work and placing them in a broader context of poetic dialogue and cultural exchange. The book is organised into five main parts, beginning with a consideration of the late Modernism of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and ranging, decade by decade, from the poetry of the Second World War and the `New Romanticism' of Dylan Thomas to the Movement, the poetry of Northern Ireland, the variety of contemporary women's poetry and the diversity of the contemporary scene. The book will be especially useful for students as it includes detailed and lively readings of works by such poets as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

Neil Corcoran's book is a major survey and interpretation of modern British poetry since 1940, offering a wealth of insights into poets and their work and placing them in a broader context of poetic dialogue and cultural exchange. The book is organised into five main parts, beginning with a consideration of the late Modernism of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and ranging, decade by decade, from the poetry of the Second World War and the `New Romanticism' of Dylan Thomas to the Movement, the poetry of Northern Ireland, the variety of contemporary women's poetry and the diversity of the contemporary scene. The book will be especially useful for students as it includes detailed and lively readings of works by such poets as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

Elizabeth Bowen is a writer who is still too little appreciated. Neil Corcoran presents here a critical study of her novels, short stories, family history, and essays, and shows that her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions.
Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return explores how she adapts Irish Protestant Gothic as a means of interpreting Irish experience during the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, and also as a way of defining the defencelessness of those enduring the Blitz in wartime London. She employs versions of the Jamesian child as a way of offering a critique of the treatment of children in the European novel of adultery, and indeed, implicitly, of the Jamesian child itself. Corcoran relates the various kinds of return and reflex in her work-notably the presence of the supernatural, but also the sense of being haunted by reading-to both the Freudian concept of the "return of the repressed' and to T. S. Eliot's conception of the auditory imagination as a 'return to the origin."
Making greater interpretative use of extra-fictional materials than previous Bowen critics (notably her wartime reports from neutral Ireland to Churchill's government and the diaries of her wartime lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie), Corcoran reveals how her fiction merges personal story with public history. Employing a wealth of original research, his radical new readings propose that Bowen is as important as Samuel Beckett to twentieth-century literary studies--a writer who returns us anew to the histories of both her time and ours.

Elizabeth Bowen is a writer who is still too little appreciated. Neil Corcoran presents here a critical study of her novels, short stories, family history, and essays, and shows that her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return explores how she adapts Irish Protestant Gothic as a means of interpreting Irish experience during the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, and also as a way of defining the defencelessness of those enduring the Blitz in wartime London. She employs versions of the Jamesian child as a way of offering a critique of the treatment of children in the European novel of adultery, and indeed, implicitly, of the Jamesian child itself. Corcoran relates the various kinds of return and reflex in her work-notably the presence of the supernatural, but also the sense of being haunted by reading-to both the Freudian concept of the 'return of the repressed' and to T. S. Eliot's conception of the auditory imagination as a 'return to the origin'. Making greater interpretative use of extra-fictional materials than previous Bowen critics (notably her wartime reports from neutral Ireland to Churchill's government and the diaries of her wartime lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie), Corcoran reveals how her fiction merges personal story with public history. Employing a wealth of original research, his radical new readings propose that Bowen is as important as Samuel Beckett to twentieth-century literary studies-a writer who returns us anew to the histories of both her time and ours.

Seamus Heaney's poetic career has been one of constant development and expansion, and his place among the world's greatest literary figures is universally acknowledged. When it first appeared in 1986, Neil Corcoran's A Student's Guide to Seamus Heaney was immediately recognized as the clearest and most thorough account of his work so far, and it has not been rivalled since. The new edition, which like the original has had the advantage of Seamus Heaney's own cooperation and unstinted access to the poet's papers, follows the same pattern, adding a chapter apiece on the major collections of poems published since 1986, as well as separate discussions of Heaney's work as a translator and essayist. The published chapters have also been revised. In consequence, this not only remains the most useful introduction to a singularly varied and important body of work, but is the most up-to-date as well.

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts which have been the subject of much contention. For a start how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in Englsih by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland-of people, community, and nation-have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. `after Yeats and Joyce' also suggests the immense influence of these two writers on the style, stances, and preoccupations of twentieth-century Irish literature. Neil Corcoran focuses his chapter on various themes such as `the Big House', the rural and provincial, with reference to authors from Kinsella and Beckett to William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, providing a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing.

This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or 'negotiates' different contexts - historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods - both traditional and modernist - and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon's prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which 'ekphrastic' work - poems which engage with visual art - by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.

This study by Neil Corcoran considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It treats its theme in British, Irish and American poets and in some influential foreign-language poets available in influential English translations. The book discusses the poetry of the First World War and the Cold War in such poets as Owen, Rosenberg, Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Lowell; the poetry and politics of modern Ireland in Yeats, MacNeice, Heaney and others; and poetry's relations with prose, painting and song in poets including Frank O'Hara, Ted Hughes and Bob Dylan. It focuses particularly on forms of modern elegy. Poetry & Responsibility includes such topics as the conflicting impulses in Owen between his obligations as a soldier and as a poet; Yeats's gradual creation of one of his greatest poems out of his responsibilities as an Irish schools inspector; Heaney's requirement that poetry make an 'apology' for itself; O'Hara's deployment of a camp sensibility in the interests of writing a politics of 1950s Black American culture; Herbert's rewriting of Hamlet as a reading of Warsaw Pact Poland; and the political and aesthetic significance of Dylan's restless self-revision. The book argues that exemplary modern lyric poetry can be shown to resist various forms of accommodation or appropriation. In its strategies of opposition, it becomes what Auden calls it in his elegy for Yeats: 'A way of happening, a mouth.'

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer an up-to-date, stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.