As a poet and critic of art and literature, and as a social and political philosopher, Sir Herbert Read exerted an important influence on the culture of his time. Not only did he assist and inspire many writers and artists, but through his work for the idea of 'education through art', he greatly influenced education, in particular the teaching of art and literature in schools. For this symposium, first issued in 1969 as the ninth number of The Malahat Review, Professor Skelton has gathered together original essays, poems and drawings which illustrate many aspects of Sir Herbert Read's life and work.

As a poet and critic of art and literature, and as a social and political philosopher, Sir Herbert Read exerted an important influence on the culture of his time. Not only did he assist and inspire many writers and artists, but through his work for the idea of 'education through art', he greatly influenced education, in particular the teaching of art and literature in schools. For this symposium, first issued in 1969 as the ninth number of The Malahat Review, Professor Skelton has gathered together original essays, poems and drawings which illustrate many aspects of Sir Herbert Read's life and work.

This is a rich harvest from a renowned translator, an elegant survivor. In 1996, in his eightieth year, David Gascoyne was awarded the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in recognition of his profound contribution to French literature and art. This collection includes some of his best work - early translations, recent unpublished translations, and a substantial section of translations printed in journals over the past twenty-five years.Translations by David Gascoyne of: Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Rene Char, Xie Chuang, Rene Daumal, Yves de Bayser, Robert Desnos, Andre du Bouchet, Paul Eluard, Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Follain, Benjamin Fondane, Andre Frenaud, Eugene Guillevic, Maurice Henry, Friedrich Holderlin, Georges Hugent, Edmond Jabes, Max Jacob, Pierre Jean Jouve, Valery Larbaud, Giacomo Leopardi, Stephane Mallarme, Loys Masson, O. V. de L. Milosz, Benjamin Peret, Francis Ponge, Gisele Prassinos, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Reverdy, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Arthur Rimbaud, Gui Rosey, Philippe Soupault, Jules Supervielle, Jean Tardieu, Georg Trakl and Tristan Tzara.

For a number of years Robin Skelton has been a major interpreter and definer of what we now mean by Anglo-Irish literature. This collection represents his own selection of fourteen of his best essays. All have been revised, several enlarged, and two are published here for the first time. Two major themes emerge from this collection: verse craftsmanship, with the language and structure of poetry; and a concern with the way that a writer can contrive to bring contraries (personal, national, aesthetic, etc.) together, fusing all the writer's themes and techniques into unity, so as to present a coherent, all-embracing "philosophy" or attitude. Most of the essays move from quite specific discussions of texts to broader generalizations about style and content in Irish writing. As always, Skelton is an extraordinarily alert and careful reader, and some of these essays contain valuable close readings of specific poems. In addition, he has the ability to draw the significant particulars into meaningful accounts of the totality of an artist's achievement. Time after time, Skelton simply makes one see new things, even in the most familiar texts, and his essays offer valuable insights both for the scholar and for the general reader of Irish literature.

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems.

For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged.

Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating ‘critical essay’ of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.

J.M.Synge died in 1909 and The Works of John M. Synge were published in four volumes by Maunsel & Co., Dublin, in 1910. Since that time, with the exception of a few minor verses and one or two fragments of prose, the canon of his work has remained unaltered. Nevertheless, much unpublished material exists, for the most part of great interest and significance for the understanding of Synge's methods of work and development. This material, including early drafts of the plays, notebooks, poems, and fragments of poetic drama, has now been thoroughly explored in order to create this definitive edition, first published by Oxford University Press 1962-68, which not only collects together all that is of significance in his printed and in his unprinted work, but also, by a careful use of worksheets and early drafts, indicates much of the process of creation which occurred before the production of the printed page.