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Drinks with Dead Poets: A Season Of Poe, Whitman, Byron, And The Brontes
by Glyn MaxwellI am walking along a lane with no earthly idea why… Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there – is he dead? in a coma? dreaming? – but he has a strange feeling there’s a class to teach. And isn’t that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not askhim to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards? Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings and Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall. And everything they say – in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys pub – comes verbatim from their diaries, essays, or letters. Drinks With Dead Poets is a homage to the departed, a tale of the lives and loves of students, a critical guide to great English poetry, the dream of a heavenly autumn. Nothing like it has ever been written.
Drives (Cape Poetry Ser.)
by Leontia FlynnFollowing on from the assured day-to-day poems of her first collection, Leontia Flynn's second, Drives, is a book of restless journeys - real and imaginary - interspersed with a series of sonnets on writers. Beginning in Belfast, where she lives, she visits a disjointed number of cities in Europe and the States - each one the occasion for an elliptical postcard home to herself.Alongside these reports from abroad, portraits of dead writers flicker through the pages of this book - Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett; Bishop, Plath and Virginia Woolf - all revealing aspects of themselves, their frailties and their sicknesses, but also, we suspect, aspects of their ventriloquising author.What these poems share is a furious refusal of received opinion, of a language recycled and redundant; they are raw exposed and angrily aware of distance - the distance between what one needs and what one receives, between love and what is lost. In particular, the lives here are haunted by the lost idyll of childhood, while poems about the poet's own mother and ageing father bring the collection to a close. With an alert ear for fracture and disarray and a tender eye for damage, Drives is a passionate enquiry into what shapes us as individuals.
The Drowned Book: Picador Classic (Picador Classic #27)
by Sean O'BrienWith an introduction by Helen DunmoreCome for a walk down the river road,For though you're all a long time deadThe waters part to let us passThe way we'd go on summer nightsIn the times we were childrenAnd thought we were lovers.The Drowned Book is a work of memory, commemoration and loss, dominated by elegies for those the author has loved and admired. Sean O'Brien's exquisite collection is powerfully affecting, sad and often deeply funny; but it is also a dramatically compelling book - disquieting, even - and full of warnings. As the book unfolds, O'Brien's verse occupies an increasingly dark, subterranean territory - where the waters are rising, threatening to overwhelm and ruin the world above. Winner of both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, The Drowned Book is an extraordinary collection, a classic from one of the leading poets of our time.
Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems
by John KinsellaDrowning in Wheat collects the best of three decades of John Kinsella's astonishing poetry in one volume. Kinsella is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest living Australian poets, and arguably the most important 'eco-poet' of the age; however, this collection also reveals a writer of unexpected and remarkable versatility, and one fluent in an almost bewildering range of forms, registers and voices. Despite its great thematic range, Kinsella's overarching project emerges all the more clearly: Drowning in Wheat is a clarion call and a call to order, a plea to listen to the earth - and to understand our own place within it while we still can. It is also an ideal introduction to one of the essential poets of the age.
Dry Stoned Walls: Poems on Alcohol Addiction, Recovery, and the Landscape (Wordcatcher Modern Poetry)
by Paul EvansA collection of poetry from Paul Evans on the subject of alcoholism and recovery, from someone who is treading that very path. Paul makes frequent connections with his homeland of Wales, and the rugged and beautiful landscape that inspires his work.
Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England
by John WestIn Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is a source of literary authority. It signals divinely inspired literary creativity. It is central to Dryden's theoretical defences of the relationship between literature and the passions. It is also crucial to his poetic practice in a variety of genres, from odes to religious poems to translations. Enthusiasm, for Dryden, ultimately enables literature to break into regions of knowledge beyond rational human comprehension. Yet after the rise of radical sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s, where claims of inspiration legitimised challenges to established political authority, enthusiasm also carried dangerous theological and political connotations. In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is thus also a pejorative term. It is used to attack political radicals and religious dissenters. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, it is at the root of many perceived threats to the stability of the Restoration state. This book explores the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in Dryden's writing and the role he conceived for it in art and society after the violent upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. Works from across his oeuvre are explored, from his early essays and heroic plays to his translations, via new readings of his famous political and religious poems. These are read alongside other major writers of the period, like Milton, and less well-known authors, such as John Dennis. The book suggests new ways of conceptualising the relationship between literary practice and ideological allegiance in Restoration England. It reveals Dryden to be a writer who was consistently interested in the limits of what literature could express, what feelings it could provoke, and what it could make people believe at a time when such questions were of uncertain political importance.
Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England
by John WestIn Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is a source of literary authority. It signals divinely inspired literary creativity. It is central to Dryden's theoretical defences of the relationship between literature and the passions. It is also crucial to his poetic practice in a variety of genres, from odes to religious poems to translations. Enthusiasm, for Dryden, ultimately enables literature to break into regions of knowledge beyond rational human comprehension. Yet after the rise of radical sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s, where claims of inspiration legitimised challenges to established political authority, enthusiasm also carried dangerous theological and political connotations. In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is thus also a pejorative term. It is used to attack political radicals and religious dissenters. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, it is at the root of many perceived threats to the stability of the Restoration state. This book explores the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in Dryden's writing and the role he conceived for it in art and society after the violent upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. Works from across his oeuvre are explored, from his early essays and heroic plays to his translations, via new readings of his famous political and religious poems. These are read alongside other major writers of the period, like Milton, and less well-known authors, such as John Dennis. The book suggests new ways of conceptualising the relationship between literary practice and ideological allegiance in Restoration England. It reveals Dryden to be a writer who was consistently interested in the limits of what literature could express, what feelings it could provoke, and what it could make people believe at a time when such questions were of uncertain political importance.
Dryden the Public Writer, 1660-1685 (PDF)
by George McfaddenThis reinterpretation of Dryden's life and works shows how his writings were influenced by important contemporaries, the power struggles of Restoration politics, and the friendships and rivalries of society. Professor McFadden sees Dryden's poems, plays, and essays as forms of address immediately related to the historical moment and the patron or dedicatee. This approach created a dialogue between the writer and his age that enabled him to interpret some of the deepest and still inchoate social and political attitudes of his day.The author traces Dryden's rise to notoriety, along with the development of the poetic techniques he used to acquire and form his audience. Dryden's work for the theater figures prominently in the analysis, including the prologues, epilogues, and especially the dedications, which have never before been exploited. Historical and biographical findings lead Professor McFadden to new readings of major works, lie also draws important conclusions bearing upon the genre of the heroic play, the relationships between lampoon, satire, and comedy in Restoration writing, and the sense in which the term "Augustan" may be applied to that writing. Finally, he demonstrates that Dryden was a writer in the fullest contemporary sense of the word: a worker in language, carrying on a creative exchange with the contingencies and forms of his time.Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (Routledge Revivals)
by Alan RoperDr. Roper describes the mode of many of Dryden’s original poems by redefining the royalism that provides the matter of some works and the metaphoric vocabulary of others. Dryden’s royalism is seen both as an identifiable political attitude and a way of apprehending public life that again and again relates superficially non-political matters to the standards and assumptions of politics in order to determine their public significance. Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, first published in 1965, principally through readings of ten poems, comes to the conclusion that Dryden’s poems are most successful when they work to create a meaningful analogy between such topics as literature and politics or between the constitution of England and the constitution of Rome, the Garden of Eden, or Israel under David.
Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (Routledge Revivals)
by Alan RoperDr. Roper describes the mode of many of Dryden’s original poems by redefining the royalism that provides the matter of some works and the metaphoric vocabulary of others. Dryden’s royalism is seen both as an identifiable political attitude and a way of apprehending public life that again and again relates superficially non-political matters to the standards and assumptions of politics in order to determine their public significance. Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, first published in 1965, principally through readings of ten poems, comes to the conclusion that Dryden’s poems are most successful when they work to create a meaningful analogy between such topics as literature and politics or between the constitution of England and the constitution of Rome, the Garden of Eden, or Israel under David.
Drysalter
by Michael Symmons RobertsWinner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry AwardShortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico PrizeMichael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines. Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul. From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality. This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.
Duino Elegies: Deluxe Edition
by Rainer Maria RilkeThe original English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West - reissued for the first time in 90 years'The deepest mysteries of existence embodied in the most delicate and precise images. For me, the greatest poetry of the 20th century' Philip PullmanIn 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.
The Dunciad in Four Books
by Valerie RumboldThe Dunciad in Four Books of 1743 was the culmination of the series of Dunciads which Alexander Pope produced over the last decade and a half of his life. It comprises not only a poem, but also a mass of authorial annotation and appendices, and this authoritative edition is the only one available which gives all the verse and the prose in a clearly laid-out form, with a full modern commentary. Accessibly presented on the same page as Pope’s text are explanatory notes, written in a style adapted to the needs of undergraduate readers, but still comprehensive enough to address the interests of scholars. The many books and pamphlets to which Pope refers have been examined in detail, and the commentary takes advantage of the fifty years’ scholarship on literary, bibliographical, cultural and political aspects of the period which has accumulated since James Sutherland’s The Dunciad, volume five of the Twickenham Edition. A substantial introduction offers a stimulating and helpful approach to the work, and the bibliography includes extensive suggestions for further reading.
The Dunciad in Four Books
by Valerie RumboldThe Dunciad in Four Books of 1743 was the culmination of the series of Dunciads which Alexander Pope produced over the last decade and a half of his life. It comprises not only a poem, but also a mass of authorial annotation and appendices, and this authoritative edition is the only one available which gives all the verse and the prose in a clearly laid-out form, with a full modern commentary. Accessibly presented on the same page as Pope’s text are explanatory notes, written in a style adapted to the needs of undergraduate readers, but still comprehensive enough to address the interests of scholars. The many books and pamphlets to which Pope refers have been examined in detail, and the commentary takes advantage of the fifty years’ scholarship on literary, bibliographical, cultural and political aspects of the period which has accumulated since James Sutherland’s The Dunciad, volume five of the Twickenham Edition. A substantial introduction offers a stimulating and helpful approach to the work, and the bibliography includes extensive suggestions for further reading.
Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets)
by David FerryHailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place. "David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."—Frank Bidart "Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."—Boston Review
Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work
by John Ackerman`That brilliant commentator on Dylan, John Ackerman' - Andrew Sinclair, Dylan Thomas: Poet of his People John Ackerman's highly acclaimed study of the poems and prose works of Dylan Thomas traces his development as a writer, linking this for the first time with his Welsh background. The formative influence of Swansea on the young poet, his family roots in West Wales and the childhood visits to Fernhill farm and the nearby Blaen Cwm cottage are all included, together with the Boat House anhd Laugharne, the absorbing village life and the inspiration of its now famous land- and sea-scapes. The impact of Welsh nonconformity and the chapel, and the radical politics of Wales are also explored as important influences on the poet's career. The 1994 preface, together with the introduction, throws new light on later poems like 'Prologue', the poet's work in film, broadcasting, as reader and as lecturer, while his own newly-discovered words, sharp and witty and with a poet's eye highlight his life, times and craft. The kaleidoscope of his changing worlds is seen in his homes in Wales and England, and his need in each one for a separate place to write, whether the hillside shed in Laugharne or a gypsy caravan in Oxfordshire or Camden.
Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by W. ChristieDylan Thomas: A Literary Life offers an account of the poet's life, along with a critical reading of his work, that is designed to close what has been called 'the yawning gap' between Dylan Thomas's popular and critical reputations.
Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit (PDF)
by Rushworth M. KidderSince the Bible appears so frequently in Dylan Thomas' work, some critics have decided that he must be a religious poet. Others, noting blasphemous statements and certain irreligious aspects of Thomas' personal life, contend that he was no such thing. Rushworth M. Kidder, investigating this problem, looks below the surface of the obviously religious imagery and discovers a more profound poetry.The first part of this book discusses the nature of religious poetry and the application of that term to Thomas' work; it then develops the necessary background based on his letters and prose comments to provide a foundation for the study; and finally it examines the relationship between the religious aspects of his poetry and his well-known ambiguity. The author re-defines the vocabulary for dealing with religious imagery by establishing three distinct categories of imagery: referential, allusive, and thematic. This original technique is used to examine critically Thomas' poems to show the development of his religious and poetic thought. There are numerous close, sensitive readings of individual poems to show how his poetry, like the Bible, teaches by parable, speaking deliberate ambiguity rather than simple dogma. This strategy inspired poetry that is technically complex but thematically simple, a mode of verse that became more explicitly religious in the poet's final years.Originally published in 1973.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Dylan Thomas (New Casebooks)
A collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most popular yet critically neglected authors, this book explores the full range of Thomas's work. It uses approaches - such as marxism, feminism and deconstruction - previously neglected by critics and focuses on his complex relationships with surrealism, modernism, Wales, popular culture, the USA and his own contemporaries. In doing so, it restores Thomas to his rightful place as a major twentieth century literary figure and cultural icon.
A Dylan Thomas Companion: Life, Poetry and Prose (Literary Companions)
by John AckermanOpening with Thomas's life, the book offers vignettes of Swansea in the 1920s and 1930s, pre- and post-war Laugharne and rural West Wales, wartime London and New York City in the early 1950s, seen through the poet's eyes. Thomas's political views are focused on, as well as his social attitudes.
Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction: A Poetics of Distress (Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction)
by Wessam ElmeligiDystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction: A Poetics of Distress unpacks the nuanced Arabic contribution to speculative fiction. Part of a larger project by Elmeligi to formulate a poetics of literary theory to read Arabic literature, this book examines Arabic dystopian fiction from the lens of social causes of psychological distress. The selected novels combine works by authors already established in studies by Western scholars and many that have not been translated before or have not received enough scholarly attention, yet. The novels represent an array of Arab countries, including Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Mauritanian, Syrian, and Tunisian authors. It also highlights the contribution of women authors to Arabic speculative fiction. This book enriches the conversation about what is quite possibly a significant speculative fiction turn in the Arabic novel, as well as provides a new theoretical approach to read such complex and innovative literature.
Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction: A Poetics of Distress (Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction)
by Wessam ElmeligiDystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction: A Poetics of Distress unpacks the nuanced Arabic contribution to speculative fiction. Part of a larger project by Elmeligi to formulate a poetics of literary theory to read Arabic literature, this book examines Arabic dystopian fiction from the lens of social causes of psychological distress. The selected novels combine works by authors already established in studies by Western scholars and many that have not been translated before or have not received enough scholarly attention, yet. The novels represent an array of Arab countries, including Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Mauritanian, Syrian, and Tunisian authors. It also highlights the contribution of women authors to Arabic speculative fiction. This book enriches the conversation about what is quite possibly a significant speculative fiction turn in the Arabic novel, as well as provides a new theoretical approach to read such complex and innovative literature.
E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (Classical Presences)
by J. Alison RosenblittThis volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet. The book also includes an edition of previously unpublished work by Cummings himself, unearthed from archival research. For the first time, the reader has access to the full scope of Cummings' translations from Horace, Homer, and Greek drama, as well as two short pieces of classically-related prose, a short 'Alcaics' and a previously unknown and classicizing parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This new work is exciting in its own right and essential to understanding Cummings' development as a poet.
E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (Classical Presences)
by J. Alison RosenblittThis volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet. The book also includes an edition of previously unpublished work by Cummings himself, unearthed from archival research. For the first time, the reader has access to the full scope of Cummings' translations from Horace, Homer, and Greek drama, as well as two short pieces of classically-related prose, a short 'Alcaics' and a previously unknown and classicizing parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This new work is exciting in its own right and essential to understanding Cummings' development as a poet.
Each Peach Pear Plum (An\i-spy-book Ser.)
by Janet Ahlberg Allan AhlbergIn this book with your little eye, take a look and play I spy - so starts the classic story from best-selling author/illustrator team, Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Each Peach Pear Plum introduces favourite fairy tale characters, such as Tom Thumb and The Three Bears and, with a poem on each page hinting as to what is hiding in the picture, children are encouraged to participate and follow the story themselves.Now available in digital format, this well-known favourite truly is a modern classic.