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Selected Poems Of Christina Rosetti (Poetry Library)
by Christina Georgina RossettiChristina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet. Rosetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope. Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange and ambiguous 'Goblin Market'.
The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel
by Jerome McGannJerome McGann takes his readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe’s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics. In a bold reassessment, McGann argues that Poe belongs alongside Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.
Theory of the Lyric
by Jonathan CullerWhat sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.
Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture
by Evan KindleyAfter the 1929 crash, Anglo-American poet-critics grappled with the task of legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Evan Kindley shows, created a new form of labor for writers to perform and gave them unprecedented say over the administration of culture, with consequences for poetry’s role in society still felt today.
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost
by William PooleWilliam Poole recounts Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton’s life and preoccupations inform the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost
by William PooleWilliam Poole recounts Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton’s life and preoccupations inform the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.
Complete Poems: Complete Poems
by John KeatsHere is the first reliable edition of Keats's complete poems designed expressly for general readers and students. Jack Stillinger provides helpful explanatory notes to the poems which give dates of composition, identify quotations and allusions, gloss names and words not included in the ordinary desk dictionary, and refer the reader to the best critical interpretations of the poems. The new introduction provides central facts about Keats's life and career, describes the themes of his best work, and speculates on the causes of his greatness.
The Poetry of John Milton
by Gordon TeskeyFor sublimity and philosophical grandeur Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe. Gordon Teskey shows how Milton’s aesthetic joins beauty to truth and value to ethics and how he rediscovers the art of poetry as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can be.
The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry
by Helen VendlerA Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence (PDF)
by Jane HedleyModern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Meredith’s Modern Love, Jane Hedley’s study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other people’s marriages. In the book’s final chapter gay marriage presents a fresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex marriage.
Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics
by O. Bradley BasslerThis book addresses the philosophy of Kant and the poetry of Shelley as historical starting points for a new way of thinking in the modern age. Fusing together critical philosophy and visionary poetry, Bassler develops the notion of visionary critique, or paraphysics, as a model for future philosophical endeavor. This philosophical practice is rooted in the concept of the indefinite power associated with the sublime in both Kant and Shelley’s work, to which the notion of the parafinite or indefinitely large is extended in this book.
Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics
by O. Bradley BasslerThis book addresses the philosophy of Kant and the poetry of Shelley as historical starting points for a new way of thinking in the modern age. Fusing together critical philosophy and visionary poetry, Bassler develops the notion of visionary critique, or paraphysics, as a model for future philosophical endeavor. This philosophical practice is rooted in the concept of the indefinite power associated with the sublime in both Kant and Shelley’s work, to which the notion of the parafinite or indefinitely large is extended in this book.
Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature
by Angela LeightonHearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.
British Prose Poetry: An Anthology Of Contemporary British Prose Poetry
by Jane MonsonThis book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre’s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem’s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.
The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
by Nikki SkillmanScience has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.
British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines (PDF)
by Editor Jane MonsonThis book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre’s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem’s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Helen VendlerHelen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language. In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect.
The Poetry of John Milton
by Gordon TeskeyFor sublimity and philosophical grandeur Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe. Gordon Teskey shows how Milton’s aesthetic joins beauty to truth and value to ethics and how he rediscovers the art of poetry as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can be.
The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
by Nikki SkillmanScience has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work
by Eleanor CookCritics and biographers praise Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry but have little to say about how it does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Eleanor Cook examines in detail Bishop’s diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. Writers, readers, and teachers will all benefit.
Baghdad: The City In Verse
by Reuven SnirBaghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day.
Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
by Gillian WhiteGillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.
Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
by Gillian WhiteGillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.
The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems And How To Read Them
by Stephen BurtThe variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel
by Jerome McGannJerome McGann takes his readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe’s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics. In a bold reassessment, McGann argues that Poe belongs alongside Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.