W. H. Auden is perhaps the most important English language poet of the 20th century. He produced marvelous poems-even in his last days.However, critics and reviewers not only have not recognized the aesthetics of the poetry Auden wrote after 1965, but they have ignored or made prejudiced and disparaging remarks about it, thus diverting subsequent critical (and popular) attention from its remarkable virtues. The aim of W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice is to clarify Auden's career-long interest in poetic theory and, above all, to show how his changing thoughts about poetry impelled him towards the production of the last three volumes of his verse.Because it links the poet's biographia literaria and his aesthetic vision, this book will appeal to poets as well as to students of writing-particularly those interested in the creative process and its correlation to artistic forms. Students of 20th-century American and British literature will find in these pages a comprehensive survey of Auden's thoughts about his art and the poetry of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. Teachers of Auden's works will appreciate the strong light such a survey casts on Auden's poetic practice. Engineers and architects, physicists and biologists, cultural critics, social scientists, philosophers, and especially Gestalt psychologists might well enjoy reading about the ways their fields have intersected and influenced the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and courageous poets.

"Black" British Aesthetics Today is a collection of twenty-four exciting critical and theoretical essays exploring current thinking about the hottest artistic, literary, and critical works now being produced by "black" Britons.This book features a number of chapters by the avant-garde "black" British novelists, poets, and artists themselves. It includes, for instance, aesthetic manifestos by Diran Adebayo, Anthony Joseph, Roshini Kempadoo, Sheree Mack, Valerie Mason-John, and SuAndi as well as key essays by globally renowned critics, including Amna Malik, Kobena Mercer, Lauri Ramey, Roy Sommer, and many others. As a compendium, this book represents a powerfully fresh intellectual current of thought. It provides readers with important insights into contemporary "black" aesthetics, and it includes an array of important clarifications initially voiced at the groundbreaking international symposium that took place on April 8, 2006, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by outstanding new scholars in this burgeoning field of study: e.g., Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Valerie Kaneko Lucas, Michael McMillan, Magdalena Maczynska, Courtney Martin, Jude Okpala, Deirdre Osborne, Koye Oyedeji, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Sandra Ponzanesi, Andrene M. Taylor, Samera Owusu Tutu, and Tracey Walters.The authors contextualise contemporary "black" British aesthetics in relation to the African, African American, and Postcolonial aesthetic traditions; they explore an exciting array of critical theories, trends of feeling, and lively aesthetic movements thriving today in "black" Britain; and they examine and assess embodied aesthetics at play in a wide range of specific works by today's most brilliant "black" British novelists, poets, photographers, live performance artists, dramatists, architects, musicians, graphic artists, and cinematographers.