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Chapman's Homer: The Odyssey (pdf)
by Homer Allardyce Nicoll George Chapman Garry WillsGeorge Chapman's translations of Homer are among the most famous in the English language. Keats immortalized the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet in the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Swinburne praised the translations for their "romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur," their "freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire." The great critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) wrote: "For more than two centuries they were the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what Greek was. Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language." This volume presents the original text of Chapman's translation of the Odyssey (1614-15), making only a small number of modifications to punctuation and wording where they might confuse the modern reader. The editor, Allardyce Nicoll, provides an introduction, textual notes, a glossary, and a commentary. Garry Wills's preface to the Odyssey explores how Chapman's less strained meter lets him achieve more delicate poetic effects as compared to the Iliad. Wills also examines Chapman's "fine touch" in translating "the warm and human sense of comedy" in the Odyssey. Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.--John Keats Review: In Chapman's "Whole Works of Homer" . . . English is spendthrift, inebriate with waste motion, at times precious and as yet uncertain of its coruscating force. It is also the language of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, charged with sensory, corporeal thrust. At moments, it is already exact in that manual, pragmatic vein which is the virtue of English. At others, it comes armed with lyric sorrow. Homer, as Chapman construes him . . . makes the English language know itself and impels it to cast its lexical-grammatical net over a thronging prodigality of life.--George Steiner "Homer in English "
Colcha
by Aaron AbeytaWinner of a 2002 American Book Award Winner of the 2002 Colorado Book Award in Poetry "The natural voice at work in the poetry sings of one human life as if it were our own. I loved listening." —Rita Kiefer, author of Nesting Doll "This just may be one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. . . . This is the kind of writing that give poetry a good name." —Mike Nobles, Tulsa World "Abeyta's poetry amazingly captures this struggle with poems that are simultaneously tortured and thankful, celebratory and melancholy, earthly and ethereal. . . . Poet Abeyta beautifully captures the hardships of living in rural Colorado." —Blue Sky Quarterly "Abeyta writes about family, friends, and famous (and infamous) locals. His approach is intimate and daring while avoiding the self-absorbed, coffee-house clichés we fear. Yes, death plays a role in the connection of community and the land, but these poems are sly rather than dark, modulated rather than graphic, sweet rather than maudlin." —Wayne Sheldrake, Colorado Central Magazine In Colcha, Aaron Abeyta blends the contrasting rhythms of the English and Spanish languages, finding music in a simple yet memorable lyricism without losing the complexity and mystery of personal experience. His forty-two poems take the reader on a journey through a contemplative personal history that explores communal, political and societal issues as well as the individual experiences of family and friends. With his distinctive voice, Abeyta invites people of all cultures to enter his poems by exploring the essence of humanity as expressed by his particular Hispanic culture and heritage. Marked by intimacy and deep sentiment, Colcha not only acquaints us with the land of Abeyta's people, but also reveals the individuals from his life and family history in the most colorful and delicate detail. We meet his abuelitos (grandparents) in poems such as "colcha" and "3515 Wyandot," and hear of their connection to the tierra and its seasons, their labor and its bounty presented both viscerally and lovingly. We also meet the nameless people: the rancheros and the herders and the farmers, the locals in their pick-up trucks, and the women who make the tortillas. Abeyta's reflections on the plight, loves, joys, failures, and exploitation of the common person in such poems as "cuando se secan las acequias," "untitled (verde)," and "cinco de mayo" belong to the literary heritage of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Walt Whitman. Colcha is not just for those who love poetry, but for all people who wish to be moved by the music of language and, while listening, perhaps to gain some personal insight into their own lives and cultural traditions.
Complete Poems for Children (Classic Mammoth Ser.)
by James ReevesIn the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature it says of James Reeves, 'His real achievement, however, lies in his poetry, which is generally regarded as the best British ''serious'' children's verse since Walter de la Mare - though the poems are usually far from serious in subject-matter.'In this complete edition, first published in 1973, the delight is two-fold as the poems are complemented by Edward Ardizzone's beautiful and witty illustrations.
The Complete School Verse
by Jennifer CurryIf you're someone who thinks the best part of school is going home, then this is the book for you! It's packed with stacks of brilliant rhymes that will keep you entertained for hours on end - in school and out!From the school swot to school dinners, we've got every subject covered in this bumper book of poetry. Don't go to school without it!
Cries Of An Irish Caveman
by Paul DurcanCries of an Irish Caveman is Paul Durcan's most inspired and surprising collection of poems. Through four distinct sections, he brings his tender lyricism to bear on the themes of love, loss, life and death.The first section describes an experience in Australia which provides a starting point for reassessing his past relationships and loves. The second returns to Ireland, its people and places, the celebrated and the unknown. The third section is a meditation on his daughter's marriage, placing within an historical and sacramental context a very personal event. And finally, in some of his most daring and original writing, Durcan describes his own twentieth-century romance, replete with ecstasies and inevitable agonies, beauty and hope, but also brutality and self-abasement.
Curtain Call: 101 Portraits in Verse
by Hugo WilliamsThe art of portraiture in poetry is traceable from the Latin poets and Chaucer via Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Browning, to the modern era of Rimbaud, Cavafy, Auden, Lowell and Hofmann. Poetry is an art form which encourages introspection, so it is a welcome break to find these poets looking outward, fondly or otherwise, in homage or in satire, at their fellow performers on the human stage. Here, you may find yourself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elvis Presley, Oscar Wilde, and the Duke of Buckingham, or buttonholed by intriguing gatecrashers to the virtual party. Who is Butch Weldy, for instance? And what did become of Waring?
Downriver
by Sean O'BrienWhile Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O’Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before. With Downriver, his fifth collection, O’Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain – and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.
Drift from Two Shores
by Bret HarteThe man on the beach.--Two saints of the foothills.--Jinny.--Roger Catron's friend.--Who was my quiet friend?--A ghost of the Sierras.--The hoodlum band (a condensed novel)--The man whose yoke was not easy.--My friend, the tramp.--The man from Solano.--The office seeker.--A sleeping-car experience.--Five o'clock in the morning.--With the entrées
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.
Electric Light: Poems (Colección Visor De Poesía Ser. #Vol. 503)
by Seamus HeaneyElectric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.Electric Light ranges from short takes ('glosses') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to 'the must and drift of talk'; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming 'the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names. The resulting poems are full of delicately prescriptive tonalities, where Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.
The Emperor's Babe: A Novel
by Bernardine Evaristo'Wildly entertaining, deeply affecting' Ali Smith, author of How to be both and AutumnA coming-of-age tale to make the muses themselves roar with laughter and weep for pity -- sassy, razor-sharp and transformative -- from the acclaimed author of Mr LovermanLondinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She's a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she's just been married off a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts...Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a story in song and verse, a joyful mash-up of today and yesterday. Kaleidoscoping distant past and vivid present, The Emperor's Babe asks what it means to be a woman and to survive in this thrilling, brutal, breathless world.
Even As We Speak: Criticism
by Clive JamesEffervescent, energetic and eclectic, this is one of the late Twentieth Century's finest minds (and bellies) on show. Even As We Speak is a compelling collection of essays in which Clive James focusses on Australian poetry; on television today; on the rise and fall of various icons; on the question of the culpability of the ordinary German in the holocaust; and there is a compellingly provocative and much-talked about piece on the death of Diana.
Favourite Poems of the Sea: Poems To Celebrate Britain's Maritime Heritage
by National Trust BooksA wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating the British coastline and life above and below the deep blue sea. Verses from our best-loved authors – such as WB Yeats, RL Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling – are accompanied by beautiful illustrations of idyllic days at sea, haunted shipwrecks and tempestuous storms. Sea shanties and siren's songs sit alongside the classic song from The Tempest and Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in this beautiful anthology of the mystical world beneath the waves.
Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century
by N. Sweet J. MelnykThis collection of twelve specially commissioned essays, the first to focus on the work of Felicia Hemans, includes new work from important critics in the field - Isobel Armstrong, Stephen Behrendt, Gary Kelly, Susan Wolfson - as well as contributions from emerging scholars. Offering close readings of Heman's poetry, new research on her reception, and analyses of her cultural significance, the collection contributes substantially to our understanding of Hemans and to current debates about romanticism, feminism, canonization, and the relations between gender, culture, and poetry.
Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials
by Susan J. WolfsonThe first standard edition of the writings of Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), this volume marks a revival of interest in, and a new critical appreciation of, one of the most important literary figures of the early nineteenth century. A best-selling poet in England and America, Felicia Hemans was regarded as leading female poet in her day, celebrated as the epitome of national "feminine" values. However, this same narrow perception of her work eventually relegated Hemans to an obscurity lightened occasionally by parody and a sentimental enthusiasm for poems such as "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers" and "Casabianca." Only now is Hemans's work being rediscovered and reconsidered--for the complexity of its social and political vision, but also for its sounding of dissonances in nineteenth-century cultural ideals, and for its recasting of the traditional canon of male "Romantics."Offering readers a firsthand acquaintance with the remarkable range of Hemans's writing, this volume includes five major works in their entirety, along with a much-admired aggregate, Records of Woman. Hemans's letters, many published here for the first time, reflect her views of her contemporaries, her work, her negotiations with publishers, and her emerging celebrity, while reviews and letters from others--including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and the Wordsworths--tell the story of Hemans's reception in her time. An introduction by editor Susan Wolfson puts these writings, as well as Hemans's life and work, into much-needed perspective for the contemporary reader.
Field Work: Poems (Fsg Classics Ser.)
by Seamus HeaneyAt the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.'Throughout the volume Heaney's outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do without.' Martin Dodsworth, Guardian
Harold Bloom's Shakespeare
Harold Bloom's Shakespeare examines the sources and impact of Bloom's Shakespearean criticism. Through focused and sustained study of this writer and his best-selling book, this collection of essays addresses a wide range of issues pertinent to both general readers and university classes: the cultural role of Shakespeare and of a new secular humanism addressed to general readers and audiences; the author as literary origin; the persistence of character as a category of literary appreciation; and the influence of Shakespeare within the Anglo-American educational system. Together, the essays reflect on the ethics of literary theory and criticism.
Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age
by D. HibberdTroubled by his complex sexuality, Monro was a tormented soul whose aim was to serve the cause of poetry. Hibberd's revealing and beautifully-written biography will help rescue Monro from the graveyard of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier, twice-married yet homosexual, Harold Monro probably did more than anyone for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and yet his reward has been near oblivion. Aiming to encourage the poets of the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte Mew and Amma Wickham.
Heine- Jahrbuch 2001: 40.Jahrgang
by Heinrich-Heine-GesellschaftIn den Aufsätzen des diesjährigen Heine-Jahrbuchs werden allgemeinere Themen der Heine-Forschung aufgegriffen. Joseph A. Kruse beschäftigt sich mit Heines doppeldeutiger Beziehung zur Zukunft, während sich Markus Hallensleben mit dem Geschichtsbegriff des späten Heine auseinandersetzt. Michael Ansel untersucht die Bedeutung von Heines »Romantischer Schule« für die hegelianische Romantikhistoriographie des 19. Jahrhunderts, und Susanne Borchardt unternimmt es in ihrem Beitrag, Heines Frauenbild anhand der beiden Sphinxgedichte zu erläutern. Hanne Boenisch beschäftigt sich mit der Beziehung Mathew Arnolds zu Heine. Mit dem nun endlich auch in deutscher Sprache vorliegenden Heine-Essay des spanischen Exil-Schriftstellers Max Aub befasst sich der Beitrag von Berit Balzer. Unter den kleineren Beitragen beschäftigen sich mehrere mit der Heine-Rezeption in Ost- bzw. Südosteuropa. Der Band enthält ferner die Reden anlässlich der Verleihung des Heine-Preises 2000 der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf an W.G. Sebald. Abgeschlossen wird das Jahrbuch wie immer durch Rezensionen und die Jahresbibliographie.
Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700)
by D. HawkesPostmodern society seems incapable of elaborating an ethical critique of the market economy. Early modern society showed no such reticence. Between 1580 and 1680, Aristotelian teleology was replaced as the dominant mode of philosophy in England by Baconian empiricism. This was a process with implications for every sphere of life: for politics and theology, economics and ethics, aesthetics and sexuality. Through nuanced and original readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, and Bunyan, David Hawkes sheds light on the antitheatrical controversy, and early modern debates over idolatry and value and trade. Hawkes argues that the people of Renaissance England believed that the decline of telos resulted in a reified, fetishistic mode of consciousness which manifests itself in such phenomena as religious idolatry, commodity fetish, and carnal sensuality. He suggests that the resulting early modern critique of the market economy has much to offer postmodern society.
If I Don't Know
by Wendy CopeWendy Cope's most recent collection, her first since Serious Concerns in 1992, extends her concern with the comedy of the examined life ('the way we have been, the way we sometimes are'), and imagines those adjustments to the ordinary which would fulfil our futures, or allow us to realize the golden age of five minutes ago, or weigh the 'out there' of the present moment, where what is in sight is also out of reach. These are poems of well-tempered yearning, conditional idylls which sing in praise of lying fallow, the creativity of daydream, the yeast of boredom, the truths of intermediacy. Wendy Cope's formal tact is alertly present - in triolets, rondeaux, villanelles, squibs, epigrams - small forms whose power to disarm goes hand in hand with her characteristically tart ripostes to the way things (usually) are. This collection extends the variousness of her occasions.
The Illustrated Old Possum: With illustrations by Nicolas Bentley (Faber Children's Classics Ser. #13)
by T. S. EliotA stunning new gift edition of this much-loved classic.Cats! Some are sane, and some are mad.Some are good, and some are bad . . .The original Old Possum's illustrations have been lovingly restored and are showcased in this beautiful new hardback edition, perfect for children and Eliot aficionados alike. These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and continue to delight children and grown-ups. The collection inspired the musical Cats!, and features Macavity, Mr Mistofelees and Growltiger!
The Journals of Sylvia Plath: Transcribed From The Original Manuscripts At Smith College
by Sylvia PlathThe Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems which make up her collections Ariel and The Colossus.'Everything that passes before her eyes travels down from brain to pen with shattering clarity - 1950s New England, pre-co-ed Cambridge, pre-mass tourism Benidorm, where she and Hughes honeymooned, the birth of her son Nicholas in Devon in 1962. These and other passages are so graphic that you look up from the page surprised to find yourself back in the here and now . . . The struggle of self with self makes the Journals compelling and unique.' John Carey, Sunday Times
Journey Through Heartsongs (Americana Ser.)
by Mattie J.T. StepanekMattie J. T. Stepanek takes us on a Journey Through Heartsongs with more of his moving poems. These poems share the rare wisdom that Mattie has acquired through his struggle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and the death of his three siblings from the same disease. His life view was one of love and generosity and as a poet and a peacemaker, his desire was to bring his message of peace to as many people as possible.
Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Romanticism in Perspective:Texts, Cultures, Histories)
by Ayumi MizukoshiThis book tackles the age-old interpretative problem of 'pleasure' in Keat's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard narrative which attribute Keat's astonishing poetic development to his separation from Hunt, the author cogently argues that Keats, profoundly imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.