Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisStatius’s Silvae, thirty-two occasional poems, were written probably between AD 89 and 96. The verse is light in touch, with a distinct pictorial quality. D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s edition, which replaced the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by J. H. Mozley, is now reissued with corrections by Christopher A. Parrott.

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Book SynopsisThis critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.Trade ReviewWalford Davies's sympathetic introduction to the character and writing of Dylan Thomas, one of the great twentieth-century poets, is illuminating for new or experienced readers. His appraisal and close readings are warmly personal, rooted in Welsh literary and social culture. - Prof. Barbara Hardy, Professor of English Literature Emeritus, University of London Walford Davies displays commendable but misplaced modesty in calling this extensively revised centenary edition of his celebrated study of Dylan Thomas an 'essay'. It is, rather, a sustained, even ecstatic meditation on the meaning of the life and the work of one of the great English language writers of the twentieth century. The book performs a miracle of compression in distilling a lifetime's learning and reflection into manageable space and offering elegant readings not only of Thomas's key writings in poetry, fiction and broadcast media but of his biographical and cultural contexts. The poet's debt to the Welsh-speaking, Non-Conformist milieu of his immediate ancestry is sensitively illuminated, and his place in the British poetry of his time and in the long history of verse in English from Chaucer to Heaney delineated with formidable skill and erudition. The volume is in the best sense a work of advocacy - and one as dapper, witty and unfanatical as it is impassioned. - Prof. Patrick Crotty, University of AberdeenTable of Contents1 'Begin at the beginning': introductory 2 'The sideboard fruit, the ferns': the poet in suburbia 3 'The loud hill of Wales': theWelshness of the work 4 'I'll put them all in a story by and by': aspects of the prose 5 'Now my saying shall be my undoing': the need to change 6 'Criss-cross rhythms': comparisons of earlier and later poems 77 7 'Ann's bard on a raised hearth': towards 'After the funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)' 8 'Mostly bare I would lie down': a creative decade ends in war 9 'Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood'; 'This unbelievable lack of wires': wartime, film work, broadcasts 98 10 'We hid our fears in that murdering breath': the war elegies 11 'Parables of sun light': towards 'Poem in October', 'Fern Hill', 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and beyond

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Book SynopsisWith Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West’s almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poets Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto Harrison. Lilburn suggests that listening, noticing, reading, and stretching our imaginations are all part of an interior stance that can assist with the difficult tasks of forming deep relationships with the land, with Indigenous peoples, and with pedagogy itself. Numinous Seditions is for scholars and readers interested in poetry, environmental philosophy, and in the possibility of a contemplative politics.Trade Review"Numinous Seditions proposes to expand the human imagination with a call to renewed vision. It invites the reader into active, thoughtful engagement with arguably the most crucial question of our time: what can I make of myself, in the world we have made for ourselves?" H. L. Hix, University of Wyoming"Among the book’s ample gifts are its refusal of confected hope and its hosting of a larger conversation. Here Ibn ‘Arabī brushes foreheads with Anne Szumigalski, Andrew Ahenakew’s polar bear shares the sky with the angel of pseudo-Dionysius. In contemplating shards of ancient wisdom, Lilburn seeks the grace needed to grieve the conflagration of the world." Warren Heiti, author of Attending: An Ethical Art“The lucent essays gathered in Tim Liburn’s new book offer what they adumbrate: a ‘refugium for attentiveness,’ opening lines of earthbound thought, enriching our lexicon, and retrieving forgotten practices in order to cultivate a contemplative, compassionate, and creative modus vivendi in the midst of the unspeakable sorrow of ecological unravelling, climatic disruption, and the continuing legacies of imperialist violence. Amongst them is a meditation on lectio divina that might be taken as a guide for reading these essays themselves, many of them tending towards the fragmentary, punctuated with pauses, and all of them replete with invitations to see, feel, and imagine otherwise.” Kate Rigby, author of Meditations on Creation in an Era of ExtinctionTable of ContentsPreface New Sadness Interiority and Climate Change Contemplative Practices, Contemplative Pedagogies Hoping for Something to Appear | The Poetry of Don Domanski Poetry’s Practice of Philosophy | Anne Szumigalski Reading William Chittick Reading Ibn ‘Arabi Happy Incompetencies, the Self’s Other Routes Poverty and the Doom of Acedia Ontological Loneliness and the Balm of Metaphor Two Readings on Snow, Two Readings on Sorrow In the Time of Extreme Heat, In the Time of the Discovery of Unmarked Graves at the Site of Residential Schools Numinous Seditions Dream Coda Glossary Reading Index

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Book SynopsisA profound vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living languageTrade Review"No one now writing on literature can match Steiner as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing." -- Robvert Alter - The Washington Post "Illumination and attractively undogmatic" -- The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisSylvia Plath (1932-1963) was one of the writers who defined the course of twentieth-century poetry. Alongside a selection of photographs and Plath's own drawings, they masterfully contextualise what the pages disclose.This later correspondence witnesses Plath and Hughes becoming major, influential contemporary writers, as it happened.

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Book SynopsisThe first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin ClassicJoshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradTrade Review“You feel you’re meeting them on a human level. The book is slim and portable, as the best poetry books are (…) Bennett and McCarthy, in their introduction, set out their criteria for inclusion in ‘Minor Notes.’ They list things like ‘minimal appearance’ in anthologies and ‘very little, if anything, in the way of secondary literature focusing on their work.’ But it becomes plain that they chose these poets because they still speak across generations. This is a passion project.(…) This is a reclamation project that goes through you like a spear.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, both scholars of African American literature, aim to widen the canon of Black poetry by spotlighting poets who have been overlooked (…) giving readers an understanding of their unique voice and poetic concerns. (…) David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Anne Spencer, and other poets interrogate everything from labor politics to friendship in finely wrought lyrics that delight and surprise, prompting the reader to wonder how these geniuses could have been sidelined for so long.” —Poets & Writers“The first in a series recovering the out-of-print words of Black poets whose work shaped the 19th and 20th centuries, Minor Notes, Volume 1 draws a bright line between the creations of the past and those of today’s bards. Curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, while featuring a foreword from former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, the book centers clear, resonant voices—like that of Angelina Weld Grimké’s, who ruminates joyfully on the beauty of living in a Black body.”—Essence

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Book SynopsisOne of America''s most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson''s poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectiTable of ContentsEditor's Introduction: Emily Dickinson's Epistemic Ambitions for Poetry Chapter 1: Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing: Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson's Poetry, Rick Anthony Furtak Chapter 2: Interiority and Expression in Dickinson's Lyrics, Magdalena Ostas Chapter 3: How to Know Everything, Oren Izenberg Chapter 4: Form and Content in Emily Dickinson's Poetry, Antony Aumann Chapter 5: The Uses of Obstruction, David Hills Chapter 6: Dickinson and Pivoting Thought, Eileen John

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Book SynopsisThis volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of William Blake (1757-1827). The edition features a selection of Blake's poetry, illuminated poetry, and prose, and includes an Introduction, Chronology, and full commentary notes.Trade ReviewThe latest edition of Blakes selected works rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. * Wayne C. Ripley, An Illustrated Quarterly *Peter Otto's William Blake (Oxford, 2018) presents the latest edition of Blake's selected works. Part of the 21st-Centu-ry Oxford Authors series, the book runs over 800 pages, and is rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. The works are arranged chronologically rather than generically, even to the point of offering Songs of Innocence alone and again with Songs of Experience. * Wayne C. Ripley, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Chronology From Poetical Sketches (1783) [An Island in the Moon] (c.1785) From Annotations to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man (1788) All Religions Are One (1788) There Is No Natural Religion (1788) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1784; notes c.1789) Songs of Innocence (1789) The Book of Thel (1789) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788; notes c.1790) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Providence (1790; notes c.1790) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) From The Notebook (c.1791-93) Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) America a Prophecy (1793) To the Public [Prospectus] (1793) From The Notebook (c.1793) For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) Europe a Prophecy (1794) The First Book of Urizen (1794) The Song of Los (1795) The Book of Ahania (1795) The Book of Los (1795) From Vala or The Four Zoas (1797-c.1807) From The Notebook (c.1797-99) From Annotations to Watson's An Apology for the Bible (1797; notes 1798) From Annotations to Bacon's Essays (1798; notes c.1798) From Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798; notes c.1798-1809) Letters [1799-1800] From Annotations to Boyd's Translation of the Inferno (1785; notes c.1800) Letters [1802-3] Memorandum in Refutation of the . . . Complaint of John Scolfield (August 1803] Letters [1803-4] From The Notebook (c.1803-04) Milton a Poem (c.1804-1811) [The Pickering Manuscript] (c.1805-07) From The Notebook (c.1807-09) Blake's Exhibition (1809) From Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-c.1820) From [A Vision of the Last Judgment] (1810) From [A Public Address to the Chalcographic Society] (c.1810) Europe, Title page (late revisions, c.1815-20) From Annotations to Spurzheim's Observations (1817; notes c.1818) Letters [1818] The Everlasting Gospel (c.1818) For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820) Annotations to Berkeley's Siris (1744; notes c.1820) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Preface to The Excursion (1814; notes 1826) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Poems (1815; notes 1826) From Annotations to Thornton's The Lord's Prayer (1827) Letter [1827] On Homers Poetry and On Virgil (c.1820) The Ghost of Abel (1822) [Jehovah]& his two Sons Satan & Adam [The Laocoön] (c.1826-27) List of Abbreviations Notes Index of Titles and First Lines

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Book Synopsis''Whoever wishes to hear about, and to know about, kings and heirs, about who first ruled England and which kings it had, Master Wace, who is telling the truth about this, has translated this.''Wace''s Roman de Brut (1155) can be seen as the gateway to the history of the Britons for both French and English speakers of the time, and thus to Arthurian history, as the first complete Old French adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth''s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (late 1130s), in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons. The Roman de Brut was a foundational work, an inspiration for a series of anonymous verse Bruts of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut -- the most widely read French vernacular text on this material in medieval England -- as well as a forerunner of the Middle English Brut tradition, including Layamon''s Brut (c. 1200). Wace''s poem thus inaugurates and shapes Brut traditions, including Arthurian tales, iTable of ContentsIntroduction Note on the Text Select Bibliography Summary of the Text ROMAN DE BRUT Explanatory Notes Manuscripts Glossary Index of Personal Names Index of Geographical Names

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Book SynopsisThis edition includes all of the known surviving writings of the poet Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-1784), several of which have been discovered since the last attempt at a complete edition in 2001. The poems and the extant prose writings are accompanied by an Introduction to her life and times, and textual and explanatory notes.Trade ReviewVincent Carretta's edition will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in Wheatley Peters's life and work... The vanishing point of [Wheatley Peters's] work stands at the far side of the history of enslavement. Given that the poems do exist, the critical imperative is to think carefully about how, and under what conditions, they came to be. Carretta makes a crucial contribution to this project. * Andrea Haslanger, Eighteenth - Century Fiction *This text leaves no stone unturned to provide a clear path for teaching the Wheatley corpus with the added benefit of drawing new and contemporary allusions to the study of "racism, sexism, and slavery", as "issues" that the early Black American poet "subtly and indirectly confronts"... Clearly, Writings is soon to become a standard for early American literature courses and one of the most practical, convenient, and useful classroom tools. * April Langley, University of Missouri-Columbia, Early American Literature *This edition, prepared by the outstanding scholar in the field, supersedes previous collections from Julian D. Mason (1966; 1989), John C. Shields (1988) and Carretta himself (Penguin, 2001). It is the fullest in scope, with abundant bibliographical detail, and it takes advantage of the steady growth in secondary literature... the most generally informative and revealing edition that has ever appeared. * Pat Rogers, Author of The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street, Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Editorial Note Note on Money The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Textual and Explanatory Notes Index of First Lines of Titles of Phillis Wheatley's Poems Index of First Lines of Phillis Wheatley's Poems General Index

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Book SynopsisTheocritus: Space, Absence, and Desire discusses many of Theocritus''s Idylls with emphasis on how these poems construct space--its contours and borders, along with the people, animals, and objects that fill it--and the equally important role of absence. Drawing on spatial theory from anthropology and cultural geography, author William G. Thalmann studies each poem in itself and in its connections with other poems, so that a loose coherence emerges among them. Spatially, the Ptolemaic empire provides a setting and reference point for the various types of Idylls (bucolic, urban, mythological, and encomiastic poems), in ways that help legitimate it. In all the idylls, however, space is constructed selectively from particular perspectives, so that it reflects and shapes people''s relations with each other and humans'' relations with nature. The bucolic Idylls in particular raise questions about being in and out of place and relations between self and other that would have been important under the conditions of mobility and intercultural contact in the early Hellenistic period. Yet theirs is a fictional world, defined more by its margins than by its center, and visions of fullness and presence of nature are always distanced from the reader. Absence is constitutive of this world, just as absence of the beloved is the precondition for the desire of bucolic characters and prompts their singing. Their desire mirrors the desire of readers for the absent bucolic world that the poems arouse and that keeps them reading.Trade ReviewThalmann offers a brilliant reading of the Theocritean corpus through the lens of space and location. Treating both realistic subjects under Ptolemaic rule and imaginary characters dwelling in bucolic space, Thalmann focuses on the dynamic of absence and desire as Theocritus' overarching theme. A pleasure to read! * Kathryn Gutzwiller, University of Cincinnati *This is a nuanced discussion of Theocritean bucolic space: how it differs from urban, agricultural, marine, and mythological realms, and the ways in which boundary dynamics inform the texts of the received corpus. A fitting successor to his work on the Argonautica. * Susan Stephens, Stanford University *Altogether this book is a delight; Thalmann effectively uses the idea of imaginative spaces to illuminate Theocritus' creation of his bucolic world while keeping the focus on the poetry, not the theory. At the same time, he engages contemporary concerns in Hellenistic poetry: the poetry book, engagement with contemporary politics, particularly the Ptolemaic Empire and Alexandrian self-consciousness. * Classical Journal-Online *Both scholarly and accessible, the study fills a need for a current book-length treatment of Theocritus and contributes to important themes in Hellenistic poetry more broadly. * Choice *[Thalmann] has authored an elegant and sensitive study that repays close engagement. It is a necessary read for anyone seriously interested in the study of Theocritus. * Classical Review *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Note on Text and Transliteration Chapter 1: Theocritean Spaces 1: The Bucolic and Urban Poems Chapter 2: Theocritean Spaces 2: Mythological and Encomiastic Space Chapter 3: The Poetics of Absence Chapter 4: On the Margins of Bucolic Chapter 5: Conclusion References Indexes

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Book SynopsisOne of a series designed to provide a new, accessible approach to the works of great poets and playwrights. Each text includes general notes on the text; discussion of themes, issues and context; and suggestions for further reading.

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Book SynopsisIn this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet''s creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet''s later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth''s long life--1770 to 1850--tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria''s Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth''s life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth''s poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.Trade ReviewThose who do not own the first edition should acquire this one...Essential. * T. Ware, Queen's University at Kingston, CHOICE *One of the many enjoyments of Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth: A Life is the quiet pride it communicates in a job well done. Wordsworth emerges from this comprehensive and absorbing study as a man whose sense of purpose and duty steadily grew from youth to old age. * Freya Johnston, The Guardian *[William Wordsworth: A Life] is judicious, fair-minded, panoptic. * Brad Leithauser, The Wall Street Journal *The richly revised second edition of Gill's biography (the first appeared in 1990), refuses the usual trajectory and instead celebrates 'a multifaceted, highly creative life of eighty years'. * Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books *A magnificent second edition, which displays the same qualities of quiet authority, tact and resistance to speculation, and thus merits consideration as a work in its own right. * Pamela Clemit, Times Literary Supplement *Reading Gill's work is a reminder of the pleasures and advantages of whole life biography. * Kathryn Hughes, New York Review of Books *Gill gives us the Wordsworth who bore life's tribulations as a philosopher, the Wordsworth renowned as a poet, but also the deeply human portrait of Wordsworth the man. * Chris Townsend, The Wordsworth Trust *Gill is the leading authority on the poet and writes in great detail about his life and work; an essential book for all students. * Robert Tanitch, The Mature Times *An essential companion to students of Wordsworth with much to offer the general reader. * Will Smith, Cumbria Life *This biography not only presents Wordsworth in the round, but also grants us a peep into his very soul. * Steve Craggs, Northern Echo *Stephen Gill's masterly and immensely readable "William Wordsworth: A Life". * Michael Dirda, The Washington Post *Review from previous edition The most scholarly and up-to-date book on Wordsworth... His judgement and interests are eminently sensible and show a full picture of Wordsworth. * Nikolai Tolstoy, Daily Mail *Impressive new Clarendon biography ...William Wordsworth: A Life is every inch the new definitive work. Gill has taken full account of Wordsworth studies in the past 30 years, blended the new materials with the old, and come out with a book that is scholarly, readable, likely to last. * Jonathan Wordsworth, Sunday Times *excellent biography of Wordsworth ... Gill is master of the very extensive primary and secondary sources, and a particular expert on the manuscripts, which the poet subjected to constant revision. * William Scammell, The Listener *not least among the virtues of this excellent biography is the way in which Stephen Gill balances the inner against the external man ... This is the kind of biography which any writer would be delighted to inspire, let alone deserve ... it is a measure of the significance of this biography that its seriousness matches that of Wordsworth itself. * Peter Ackroyd, The Times *all stolid good sense * Blake Morrison, The Bookseller *thorough, scholarly biography * Anthony Powell, Weekend Telegraph *Stephen Gill's new biography ... is enormously well-informed and avoids extravagant speculation, ... It provides an entertaining, shrewd, and manageably-sized narrative of Wordsworth's life * Peter Swaab, Sunday Telegraph *Stephen Gill's admirable biography ... it succeeds, where such biographies often fail, in transforming the life into the work by actively exploring, not avoiding, the complex problems that Wordsworth's self-account presents to his biographer. * London Review of Books *lively, painstaking book * Archie Hind, Glasgow Herald *Gill has already proved himself as an editor of Wordsworth's manuscripts and now turns that research to elegant profit. * Anthony Lane, Independent *It is difficult to see how a biography of Wordsworth could be enthralling, but Stephen Gill has made his so. This densely particularised and humane biography returns us anew to the poet's questions with an inwardness and sympathy few previous writers have displayed. * Isobel Armstrong, Southampton University, TES *the first comprehensive biography of Wordsworth since Mary Moorman's 30 years ago. * Blake Morrison, Observer *not many biographies are so admirably devoid of pretentiousness, silliness, and banality. * Chloe Chard, Weekend Financial Times *in Stephen Gill's monumental work, exacting, controlled, measured and profound, we have a moving portrait of a great poet the confirming of whose reputation has been substantially advanced by Gill's scholarship and judgment. * Bruce Arnold, Irish Independent *Gill is an immensely learned, scrupulous and judicious guide ... It is a mark of a good biography that the peripheral figures - the friends and acquaintances - are brought to life by a few swift, bold strokes ... A new biography of Wordsworth was certainly needed, and this one will be an indispensable companion for Lake Poet enthusiasts. Its insights are astute and its choice of quotation excellent; it could not have condensed more information into a single volume, yet it never becomes a mere procession of facts ... this volume is fluent and comprehensive. * Jonathan Bate, Country Life *a large, very readable study by Oxford scholar Stephen Gill who makes use of much fresh material. * Michael Field, The Star *thorough and scholarly biography ... Many books have been on Wordsworth, but this one takes a fresh look at contemporary records and the mass of material which has been unearthed since the last serious biography, a quarter-of-a-century ago. * John Hurst, Cumberland & Westmorland Herald *What Gill has done, very well, is to match the poetry to the poet's development. Gill, with his illuminating extracts, saves us from our own ignorance. * Anthony Hern, London Evening Standard *this biography clears new and central ground for future academic revaluations of the poet and his work ... It renders Wordsworth newly accessible and calls attention to his reciprocal relation to, and profound effects on, the national life. * New York Times Book Review *a lovingly told story * Christopher Hall, The Countryman *a thorough and detailed study of Wordsworth's life in relation to the poetry ... Gill is a thoughtful critic as well as a careful biographer ... sympathetic study. * J. B. Pick, The Scotsman *When dealing with politics or family matters Gill can be very shrewd, and especially so in his subtle account of the growing strains between Wordsworth and Coleridge after 1800. And on textual matters Gill writes with an authority well beyond that of any previous biographer. Many of his poetry discussions are first rate, sensitive and illuminating. * Norman Fruman, Times Literary Supplement *an eminently accessible as well as definitive study of the poet's life. * Sunday Times *not a general biography of the Great Lakes poet, nor is it merely a critique of his work ... It is an authoritative and readable study ... of Wordsworth's writing in an effort to lay bare the poet's life as a writer of poetry "full of human understanding and experience." ... a fascinating and enlightening study ... few will deny it's value in bringing the man and his work into fresh perspective. * Evelyn Holtzhausen, Cape Times *This isn't a critical book ... and discussion of the poetry is carefully fused with Wordsworth's self-discussion. ... this biography is good value ... Always well-written, it wears its substantial scholarship lightly * Simon Petch, Sydney Morning Herald *Stephen Gill ... has written what must now be the definitive biography ... a multitudinous life about which, even after reading this thorough and admirable biography we still wish we knew more. * David Parkin, Yorkshire Post *a model literary biography * Bernard Bergonzi, The Tablet *compendious new biography of William Wordsworth ... solidly constructed * Chicago Tribune *the biography is both scholarly and readable ... If William Wordsworth: A Life brings new readers to the poems or old readers back it will have succeeded admirably in its aim. * Peter Dyson, University of Toronto, The Globe and Mail *Gill has performed a remarkable act of revisionary scholarship by shifting the bulk of the story to the years at Rydal Mount ... this is a distinguished work of literary biography ... The biographer's wide-ranging knowledge of the period adds immensely to the success of this study. It will be many years before another biography of Wordsworth is required. * Jay Parini, USA Today *He offers a more factually meticulous version of the poet's early years to stand beside the mythopoeic self-presentation of the poetry. He understands the importance of Wordsworth's inner life. Gill's biography quietly but memorably reveals the drama of Wordsworth's life. * Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor *fine new biography ... Mr Gill's biography is up-to-date in its scholarship ... It neither sentimentalizes nor oversimplifies. * Richard Locke, Columbia University, Wall Street Journal *all stolid good sense * John Linklater, The Bookseller *this biography contains much to interest scholars * Henry Bartlett, The Courier-Mail *it is robust and intelligent on his marvellous body of poetry * Observer *Gill's narrative is well-paced and well-written. Gill's account is comprehensive and engaging, and skilful in its corporation of biographical detail. The Wordsworth specialist, as well as the general reader, will come away from it refreshed and inspired. * Charles Rzepka, Boston University, Essays in Criticism *eloquent and straight-forward retelling of Wordsworth's life * J.D. Gutteridge, Notes and Queries *triumphantly reconciles a vast amount of material to produce a life of Wordsworth that is sensitive to modern scholarship and faithful to the age in which the poet himself lived ... Stephen Gill has written a biography of Wordsworth for our times, and it will remain the standard life of the poet for many years to come. * Nicholas Roe, University of St Andrews, Review of English Studies, Vol. XLI, No. 164, Nov '90 *An assured blend of old and recently-researched material which combines fluently into a vibrant study of the poet. Mr Gill avoids wild speculation and brings us the essence of the man thankfully devoid of spurious conjecture. * Tony Firth, Yorkshire Post *a unique look at this Romantic poet * Windsor Star *Table of ContentsPart I: BEGININGS 1: 1770-1787 2: 1787-1792 3: 1793-1795 4: 1795-1797 5: 1797-1798 6: 1798-1799 Part II: MIDDLE YEARS 7: 1800-1802 8: 1803-1805 9: 1806-1810 10: 1810-1815 11: 1816-1820 Part III: LATER YEARS 12: 1820-1822 13: 1822-1832 14: 1833-1839 15: 1840-1850

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Book SynopsisCovering an extensive range of poets, this is the first comprehensive study of the sonnet from the Renaissance to the present. It traces the development of the sonnet and explores why the sonnet is such an attractive form for writers and how it works in terms of shape and rhyme scheme.Trade ReviewThere is no better close reader of the formal effects of sonnet structure, sound, syntax, rhyme, and rhythm. He exfoliates their localised effects with such deft care and artfulness ... Regan manages somehow to hold our attention throughout and focus his interpretive energies so that each sonnet gets its due and reveals its singular qualities. To read The Sonnet is to have the eye trained to see more, even in sonnets of well-worn familiarity. From now on, whenever I teach or write about sonnets, the first question I will ask myself is: what did Regan have to say? * Joshua Reid, The Spenser Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: The Renaissance Sonnet 2: The Romantic Sonnet 3: The Victorian Sonnet 4: The Irish Sonnet 5: The American Sonnet 6: The Modern Sonnet Epilogue: The Sonnet and its Travels Bibliography

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Book Synopsis''The Apennines are Italy'' exclaimed The Examiner two centuries ago, yet this unique region and its striking literary and cultural connections are underappreciated in the English-speaking world. Apennine Crossings: Travellers on the Edge of Tuscany links a twenty-first century journey in the mountains of Northern Italy to past writers, routes, and travellers. It follows the modern long-distance walking trail of the ''Great Apennine Excursion'', whilst moving back and forth in time: from the Middle Ages to World War Two and from the journeys of pilgrims, merchants, and tourists to those of soldiers, partisans, and poets. Stories of past travellers in the region continually intersect with a contemporary account of a walk across the ridge of the Northern Apennines.Alongside Nick Havely''s present-day narrator and traveller, the cast of characters includes major writers and poets, such as Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, Shelley, and Stendhal, together with a multitude of less well-known figures whose journeys, experiences, and responses cast new light on a landscape that is close to yet remote from the sites typically visited by modern travellers to Italy. Havely draws these earlier travellers'' stories from a wide range of published and unpublished sources such as letters, journals, memoirs, poems, and interviews. Together, they illustrate several significant themes: the histories of mountain passes, remote lakes, and ancient sanctuaries; perceptions of the mountains; the social and religious culture of the Northern Apennines; the preoccupations of literary tourism; the impact of campaigns and conflict during World War Two; and the effects of depopulation and deforestation.The Apennine region features in its full literary, historical, and cultural richness. Included are twenty-six illustrations, with maps for the whole route and for the sections covered by each of the book''s seven chapters.

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Book SynopsisWedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece traces the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and its tropes as a genre that became crystallized throughout the ages. It explores how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature. It first analyzes how explicit or implicit matrimonial references shape archaic epic diction and become an integral part of epic discourse; orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. This author discusses the multiple platforms that enrich the wedding song tradition, including children''s songs, hymns, paeans, and ululations, arguing for a combination of ritualized discourse with ludic childhood poetics. With an approach from cognitive and trauma studies, such references can be more revealing of the female experience than previously acknowledged. This book resists the idea that a wedding constitutes an initiation ritual, arguing that what on the surface may seem like a transition to a new phase reveals other underlying trends that work against the concept of a passage. It further considers how emotion is staged and revisits the poetics of return by looking at patterns such as the eloping, returning, failed, and dead bride. Finally, the theme of separation and return as an exemplification of a distinct female nostos is revisited in female-authored poetry, which helps us decode the complex interweaving of wedding performances and lamentation, among other types of performance.

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Book SynopsisThe monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. Geoffrey Chaucer has long been lauded as the Father of English Poetry. For later aTrade Reviewher overall argument, that The Canterbury Tales insistently deauthorizes paternal authority, is convincing and at times compelling. Critics should find many of her readings useful. * Thomas Prendergast, Speculum *Seal assures us that despite Chaucer's clear-eyed sense of the inevitable losses and imperfections of generation, he nevertheless understands it as an essential human activity. Memory and authority may be fragile and limited, but they are not therefore to be abandoned entirely, and the pilgrims, the frame, and the tales themselves show us Chaucer's sense of the appeal and the uncertainty of both paternity and poetry... Father Chaucer offers a new angle on Chaucer's undoubted fascination with authority of various kinds... * Claire M. Waters, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 42, 2020 *Samantha Katz Seal upends conventional thinking on the supportive structures of the patriarchy ... [her] work challenges accepted conventions in ways that are both surprising and long overdue. * The Year's Work in English Studies, Vol. 100.1 *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Dream of Father Chaucer Part I. On Certainty 1: Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text 2: The Uneasy Institution: Lineage and the Wife of Bath Part II. On Creation 3: Uncertain Labor: Conception and the Problem of Productivity 4: Adultery's Heirs: Multiplying Excess Part III: On Likeness 5: Almost Heirs: Daughters and Disappointments 6: Father Chaucer's Heirs

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Book SynopsisThe Caribbean has produced one of the most vigorous and exciting bodies of poetry in the twentieth century, and this anthology covers all its major languages. Featuring a range of poets from Derek Walcott to Jesus Cos Causse, and Olive Senior to Una Marson, this is a rich and satisfying book.Trade ReviewReview from previous edition 'a wonderful beginner's guide to the amazing riches of caribbean poetry. The editors provide an excellent, comprehensive introduction.' * Bernadine Evaristo, The Guardian *

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Book SynopsisHow the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the natural speech model inherited from the great Modernist poets comes up against the natural speech of the Donahue talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a poet better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape contamination from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1: Avant-Garde or Endgame? 2: The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing 3: Against Transparency: From the Radiant Cluster to the Word as Such 4: Signs Are Taken for Wonders: The Billboard Field as Poetic Space 5: The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed: From Free Verse to Procedural Play 6: How It Means: Making Poetic Sense in Media Society 7: cage: chance: change Notes Index

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Book SynopsisEsteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components.Trade Review“What is the difference between attending a botany seminar and immersing oneself in the forest in the company of a guide who passionately knows their flora and fauna? This is what one discovers by reading Perloff's Infrathin, an irresistible tour through the work of some of the main artisans of modernist and contemporary poetry, under the prism of an unusual mentor: Marcel Duchamp. A gift for lovers of the genre and a must-read for poets.” * André Vallias, poet and graphic designer *“INFRA, not intra, and THIN, a split second so sliced, its instant infinity so spilt. Infrathink with Duchamp and Co. to step into a whole new world of differential repetitions and serial departures across the world of modern(ist) art, especially poetry. Whether you just ‘think different’ or have already ‘done différance,’ as you continue to make your way through the alreadymadeness of modern times so remade, you, too, with Marjorie Perloff, our go-to code-breaker here, will get this: how and why reading between the cracks, not just lines, matters.” * Kyoo Lee, author of 'Reading Descartes Otherwise' *“This age of polarization needs those who build bridges—not necessarily to create unity or understanding, but to allow life-giving movement between thought and creativity. The impact of Perloff's impressive lifelong project becomes even clearer with this book: her refusal to let academic propriety constrain her and her determination to give her great intelligence free play and to follow her deepest enthusiasms. As a result, we have a book that will illuminate and give pleasure to both scholar and poet, wherever they might come from.” * Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, essayist, and musician *"If at times this book feels like the seven conference papers or essays they previously were, reworked into chapters, and if at times Perloff makes some rather personal, associative and conjectural leaps when undertaking her poetic deconstructions, it can be forgiven in the light of surprise, intelligence and originality. I haven’t enjoyed a serious and challenging critical book like this for a long time." * Tears in the Fence *"In Infrathin, the superb new book by one of America’s most engaging, irreverent, and original literary critics, Perloff returns to some of the main questions that have preoccupied her during her more than five decades of writing on 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics. . . . Perloff’s book is an exercise in attention to difference, to the smallest, subliminal variations that give a particular poetic passage its texture." -- Tal Goldfajn * Los Angeles Review of Books *"In Perloff's hands, reading for the infrathin means 'paying the closest possible attention to the bedrock of poetry. . . its language and rhythm' and turning a careful eye to the visual layout of words and images on pages. Infrathin is thus a romp through some very close readings of (or listenings to) a select few poems by authors familiar in Perloff's extensive oeuvre, including Stein, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Beckett, Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, and Rae Armentrout." * Choice *"Marjorie Perloff continues to write theoretical and critical books that are both perceptive and highly readable." * Tears in the Fence: An Independent, International Literary Magazine *"In Infrathin, Perloff shows how the Brazilian concrete poets kept faith with Pound’s sense of spatial syntax in ways which Olson, with his looser free-verse compositional method, did not. Her readings of Olson here are compelling. " * Fortnightly Review *"Perloff makes us see what was always literally before our eyes. She does so with an evident passion informed by a long saturation in the poets she analyzes... This book reminds us how rewarding that perennial practice [of close reading] can be." * Critical Inquiry *"Infrathin is Perloff at her most delightful and insightful, with startling, fresh, indeed original, readings of some of her longtime interests — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Duchamp (who invented the term infrathin), Stevens, Beckett, Howe, Ashbery, Armantrout." * Common Knowledge *Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface A Note on Scansion and Notation Introduction: Toward an Infrathin Reading/Writing Practice 1 “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rrose Sélavy”: Stein, Duchamp, and the “Illegible” Portrait 2 Eliot’s Auditory Imagination: A Rehearsal for Concrete Poetry 3 Reading the Verses Backward: The Invention of Pound’s Canto Page 4 Word Frequencies and Zero Zones: Wallace Stevens’s Rock, Susan Howe’s Quarry 5 “A Wave of Detours”: From John Ashbery to Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout 6 The Trembling of the Veil: Poeticity in Beckett’s “Text-Soundings” 7 From Beckett to Yeats: The Paragrammatic Potential of “Traditional” Verse Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction1. The First Crisis in First Philosophy2. Achilles and the Iliad3. The Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad4. The Furies of Aeschylus5. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus6. Euripides' Hippolytus7. On Greek Tragedy8. Physics and Tragedy: On Plato's Cratylus9. On Plato's Symposium10. Protagoras's Myth and Logos11. On Plato's Lysis12. On Interpreting Plato's Charmides13. Plato's Laches: A Question of Definition14. On Plato's Phaedo15. Plato's Theaetetus: On the Way of the Logos16. On Plato's Sophist17. The Plan of Plato's Statesman18. On the Timaeus19. On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle's Metaphysics A20. Strauss on PlatoSelected Works by Seth BenardeteIndex

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Book SynopsisThe authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, this book analyzes - beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems - the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop.Trade Review"Robert von Hallberg is a careful, deep, and often counterintuitive thinker about poetry in general and about particular strands of modern poetry: his originality makes him impossible to place (or write off) as a partisan of a given school, and his consistent attention to the words on the page means there's scarcely a reading in Lyric Powers that doesn't say something valuable. He's a pleasure to read." - Stephen Burt, Harvard University"

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisAn annotated selection of the letters of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, from childhood through the last year of her lifeTrade Review“Into the World’s Great Heart is a fascinating, meticulously documented, behind-the-scenes look at a writer’s informal use of words in letters as Millay describes her passions, obsessions, and wide-ranging intellectual interests.”—Laurie Lisle, author of Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe“No one writes like Millay. Her letters bring her unique wit and intelligence vividly to life. This invaluable new edition will make you fall in love with Millay all over again.”—Melissa Girard, Loyola University Maryland“The ‘tendrils of faith’ which Millay described as the natural force driving her poetry became live wires connecting her to a wide audience of admirers. In this new, masterfully edited collection, her letters have the same gripping effect on her readers.”—Thomas E. Hill, Vassar College“What a joy to enter into the ‘great heart’ of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s correspondence! Editor Timothy F. Jackson skillfully highlights the versatile voice of this famous poet and iconic modern woman.”—Catherine Keyser, author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture“Edna St. Vincent Millay possessed so much life and daring and wit that she leaps from the page in these letters. What a pleasure to share her company.”—Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own

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Book SynopsisThis beautifully produced first annotated edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s oeuvre re-presents the work of the Jazz Age’s most famous poetTrade Review“Particularly useful to student readers, but also to advanced scholars.”—James Gifford and Margaret Konkol, The Year’s Work in English Studies“Yale University Press’s edition of the Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, superbly edited by Timothy Jackson, and with a brilliant introduction by Millay scholar Holly Peppe, constitutes a significant addition both to our understanding of Twentieth-Century American Poetry as well as to a fuller, more complex and balanced portrait of who the extraordinary poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was and—more importantly—is to readers searching for a more accurate picture of what made Modern Poetry modern. If she has been too often overlooked in the last half century and more, this edition will undoubtedly help restore Millay’s brilliant, witty, and tragic feminine voice to her rightful place among the company of Hart Crane, Frost, Williams, Pound, Eliot and Stevens.”—Paul Mariani, Boston College“Edna St. Vincent Millay is like Robert Frost or Philip Larkin in that her poems would survive even if every professor and professional critic ignored them (as, at times, they have). Her poems are both ancient and modern, comprised of equal parts pain and elation, ravishing music and stark reality. She can break your heart, or, perhaps more importantly, remind you of the person who once had a heart that could be broken.”—Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss“Many of the poets and academics who once dismissed Edna St. Vincent Millay as minor, and stylistically old fashioned are themselves now unread, forgotten. Millay’s poem are still powerfully alive. As this first rate edition shows.”—Greg Delanty, author of Book Seventeen“Assumptions about Millay’s work are too often based on her early poems or the romantic lyrics. This exceptionally fine selection represents a wide range of Millay’s work from her entire career. Brilliantly and meticulously edited, it offers an illuminating new perspective on Millay’s achievement. Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay celebrates a force of nature whose artistry this elegant annotated edition brings to light.”—Phillis Levin, author of Mr. Memory & Other Poems

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Book SynopsisA E DYSON has a longstanding knowledge and appreciation of the work of Gunn, Hughes and Thomas and this selection of criticism also includes original contributions by him on all three poets. As general editor of the Casebook series and former co-editor of the Critical Quarterly he is well-qualified to provide an authoritative and thought provoking introduction to their poetry. A E Dyson is an Honorary Fellow of the University of East Anglia.

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Book SynopsisROBERT SHAUGHNESSY is Principal Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Surrey, Roehampton.

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Book SynopsisThis volume considers representations of space and movement in sources ranging from Roman comedy to late antique verse, exploring how poetry in the Roman world is fundamentally shaped by its relationship to travel within the geography of Rome's far-reaching empire.The volume surveys Roman poetics of travel and geography in sources ranging from Plautus to Augustan poetry, from the Flavians to Ausonius. The chapters offer a range of approaches to: the complex relationship between Latin poetry, Roman identity, imperialism, and travel and geospatial narratives; and the diachronic and generic evolutions of poetic descriptions of space and mobility. In addition, two chapters, including the concluding one, contextualize and respond to the volume's discussion of poetry by looking at ways in which Romans not only write and read poems about travel and geography, but also make writing and reading part of the experience of traveling, as demonstrated in their epigraphic practices. The colTrade Review"...The vol>ume overall offers an impressive combination of topics and approaches in current research and is a collection of papers that will undoubtedly take readers on an enthralling and inspir>ing literary journey." - The Classical ReviewTable of ContentsList of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; 1 Introduction: Traversing Empire, Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer; 2 The Stage at The Fair: Trade and Human Trafficking in the Palliata, Amy Richlin; 3 Expanding Geographies and Unbounded Subjects in Catullus, Sara H. Lindheim; 4 Arcadia and the Roman Imagination, Eleanor W. Leach; 5 Women’s Travels in Latin Elegy, Alison Keith; 6 On the Road with Tibullus: Aporia or Castration as the Way of Love, Paul Allen Miller; 7 Competing Itineraries, Travel, and Urban Subjectivity in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Erika Zimmermann Damer; 8 Statius’ Propemptikon and the Geopoetics of Silvae 3.2, Carole E. Newlands; 9 Martial, Spain, and the Girls from Gades: Travel and Identity in Flavian Epigram, Sarah H. Blake; 10 Memory Spaces of Ausonius and Rutilius Namatianus, Grant Parker; 11 Travelers and Texts: Reading, Writing, and Communication on the Roads of the Roman West, Alexander Meyer; Index

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Book SynopsisByron's Poetry and Prose presents an extensive selection of Byron's poetry, letters, and journal entries in chronological clusters, allowing readers to see the changes that took place in his writing in the context of the places he lived and his fame, exile, and travels.Trade Review"This careful and textually-conservative edition will serve as an excellent introductory volume to Byron for students. . . . Alice Levine is to be congratulated on bringing the Norton Byron into the twenty-first century with a resounding bang." -- Byron JournalTable of Contentsclick here for contents page

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Book SynopsisThis Norton Critical Edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel is based on Margaret Reynolds’ variorum edition, which the British Academy awarded the 1993 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and which is reprinted here by special arrangement with the Ohio University Press.

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Book SynopsisAn essential reader's guide specifically designed for students of English Literature studying Geoffrey Chaucer's Middle English poem set in the Trojan War. This guide covers the entire text in short sections, as well as providing brief and accessible introductions to key topics and sources in short textboxes.Trade Review'Jenni Nuttall's Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader's Guide provides an invaluable teaching and learning resource which is aimed mainly at students of Chaucer. Its analysis covers the entire text; it is detailed and helpfully divided into sections, with key information highlighted in bold. The commentaries on each passage contain observations on plot, characterization, critical debate, and narrative voice, while close attention is paid to matters of style. Succinct introductions to key themes (Fortune, Felicity, and the Religion of Love, for example) and relevant antecedents (e.g. Petrarch's Sonnet 132) are positioned within discreet text boxes, guiding the reader through some of the central themes of the text.' The Year's Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction; Book I; Book II; Book III; Book IV; Book V; Further reading; Index.

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Book SynopsisBook XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses presents a wide variety of brilliant episodes, from the rhetorically charged contest between Ulysses and Ajax over the arms of Achilles, to the tragic tale of Hecuba and her gruesome revenge, to the amusing story of Polyphemus' unrequited love for Galatea and its bloody conclusion. This edition discusses in detail Ovid's treatment of his sources and sets out the ways in which he has adapted earlier literature as material for his novel work. Guidance is offered on points of language and style, and the Introduction treats in general terms the themes of metamorphosis and the structure of the poem as a whole.Trade Review'This is a volume of which both Hopkinson and Cambridge can be proud.' The Classical Review'Metamorphoses Book XIII, one of the most 'Greek' books of the Ovidian poem, has received a commentary by a distinguished Hellenist, a commentary which turns out to be one of the best Latin examples in the Cambridge 'green-and-yellow' series … a fresh, exciting and perceptive reading of this important book. It will be a precious tool for all Ovidian scholars.' Journal of Roman Studies'This edition of, and commentry on, Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses ...strikes me as particularly satisfactory and commendable... There are very few things I miss here...' ArctosTable of ContentsIntroduction: 1. Metamorphosis; 2. Structure and themes; 3. Lines 1-398: the Judgment of Arms; 4. Lines 408-571: Hecuba; 5. Lines 576-622: Memnon; 6. Lines 632-704: Anius and his daughters; 7. Lines 13.730-14.222: Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus; Scylla, Glaucus and Circe; The text and apparatus criticus; P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoseon Liber Tertivs Decimvs; Commentary.

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Book SynopsisOvid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America discuss the backgrounds and contexts for Ovid, the individual works, and his influence on later literature and art. Coverage of essential information is combined with exciting critical approaches. This Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Ovid, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.Trade Review'The duties of an informative companion attending readers of Ovid are admirably fulfilled in H's volume by the essays that discuss broader themes …' Journal of Roman Studies'… [the] Companion succeeds admirably by surveying the entire range of Ovid criticism at the level of theme, genre, narratology, key aspects of cultural studies, and reception … The result is a collection that both beginners and old hands will find informative and stimulating, and I can recommend it with enthusiasm to readers of both kinds.' Bryn Mawr Classical Review'The Cambridge Companion to Ovid succeeds from the point of view both of editorial design and of the quality of the individual contributions. The result is a collection that both beginners and old hands will find informative and stimulating, and I can recommend it with enthusiasm to readers of both kinds.' BMCRTable of ContentsList of illustrations; List of contributors; Preface; Introduction Philip Hardie; Part I. Contexts and History: 1. Ovid and ancient literary history Richard Tarrant; 2. Ovid and early imperial literature Philip Hardie; 3. Ovid and empire Thomas Habinek; 4. Ovid and the professional discourses of scholarship, religion, rhetoric Alessandro Schiesaro; Part II. Themes and Works: 5. Ovid and genre: evolutions of an elegist Stephen Harrison; 6. Gender and sexuality Alison Sharrock; 7. Myth in Ovid Fritz Graf; 8. Landscape with figures: aesthetics of place in the Metamorphoses and its tradition Stephen Hinds; 9. Ovid and the discourses of love: the amatory works Alison Sharrock; 10. Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses Andrew Feldherr; 11. Narrative technique and narratology in the Metamorphoses Alessandro Barchiesi; 12. Mandati memores: political and poetic authority in the Fasti Carole Newlands; 13. Epistolarity: the Heroides Duncan F. Kennedy; 14. Ovid's exile poetry: Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis Gareth Williams; Part III. Reception: 15. Ovid in English translation Raphael Lyne; 16. Ovid in the Middle Ages: authority and poetry Jeremy Dimmick; 17. Love and exile after Ovid Raphael Lyne; 18. Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance afterlives Colin Burrow; 19. Recent receptions of Ovid Duncan F. Kennedy; 20. Ovid and art Christopher Allen; Dateline; Works cited; Index.

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Book SynopsisA bold, transformative new translation of Ovid''s classicOvid''s epic poem has, with its timeless stories, inspired and influenced generations of writers and artists, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Picasso and Ted Hughes. The events it describes - the flight of Icarus, the music of Orpheus, Perseus'' rescue of Andromeda, the fall of Troy - speak toward the essence of human experience: of power, of fate and, most fundamentally, of transformation.Stephanie McCarter''s new rendering, the first female translation in over sixty years, places its emphasis on the sexual violence at the heart of the poem - nearly fifty of the epic''s tales involve the rape or attempted rape of women. While past translations have often obscured or mitigated this fact, expressing Ovid''s language in consensual terms, McCarter considers it explicitly, and so offers a powerful new exploration of this essential work.Trade Review“The true brilliance, that is, the true reading, the accessibility, of McCarter’s tapestry lies in her use of poetic form.(…) Throughout, McCarter produces gorgeous basso continuo undertones juxtaposed against sharp and high-pitched rhymes. Such formal elements of the translation ultimately represent McCarter’s interpretation of Metamorphoses and the art of translation itself—that humble human craft that has the capacity to stand against and despite the will of gods, power, and time. McCarter has produced her own masterpiece that ‘Jove’s wrath cannot / destroy, nor flame, nor steel, nor gnawing time.’ ‘My name,’ she writes, ‘can’t be erased.’” —Anna Deeny Morales, 2023 American Poets Prize citation for The Academy of American Poets“The best translation of a work of ancient literature that I read this year was Stephanie McCarter's marvellous new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in fresh, readable, vivid iambic pentameter. McCarter captures Ovid's wit and cleverness, making us laugh at the escapades of abusive, lust-crazed, arrogant gods and hapless, also lust-crazed and arrogant mortals. But she also brilliantly evokes Ovid's more serious sides, including his attentiveness to power and the magical vivacity of the natural world. Her wonderful handling of the metrical poetic form is a fitting match for Ovid's artful, fluent Latin verse.”—Emily Wilson, The New Statesman“McCarter confronts the tricky issues associated with both the poet and his epic not only in her forthright introduction but in the translation itself, where, like an art restorer removing decades of browned varnish from an Old Master, she strips away a number of inaccuracies and embellishments that have accreted in translations over the decades and centuries, obscuring the sense of certain passages, particularly those portraying women and sexual violence… McCarter’s translation reproduces Ovid’s speed and clarity. Even better, she is alert to many of the sparkling verbal effects for which the poet was famous in his own time… If you didn’t know she was writing about the concerns of someone who died twenty centuries ago, you’d think her subject was still alive.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker“McCarter adroitly captures Ovid’s glittering darkness. There is horror here but there is also so much wonder and delight, all conveyed in nimble, fresh language.” —Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire“The Metamorphoses has it all: sex, death, love, violence, gods, mortals, monsters, nymphs, all the great forces, human and natural. With this vital new translation, Stephanie McCarter has not only updated Ovid's epic of transformation for the modern ear and era --- she's done something far more powerful. She's paid rigorous attention to the language of the original and brought to us its ferocity, its sensuality, its beauty, its wit, showing us how we are changed, by time, by violence, by love, by stories, and especially by power. Here is Ovid, in McCarter's masterful hands, refreshed, renewed, and pulsing with life.” —Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung“Stephanie McCarter’s gorgeous verse translation of the Metamorphoses is ground-breaking not just in its refreshingly accessible approach to Ovid’s syntax and formal devices but for how she reframes the controversial subjects that have made Ovid, and Ovidian scholarship, so fraught for contemporary readers. McCarter’s translation understands that the Metamorphoses is a complex study of power and desire, and the dehumanizing ways that power asserts itself through and on a variety of bodies. McCarter’s deft, musical, and forthright translation returns much needed nuance to Ovid’s tropes of violence and change, demonstrating to a new generation of readers how our identities are always in flux, while reminding us all of the Metamorphoses’ enduring relevance.” —Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale"A graceful and fluid and deeply meaningful translation. Compared to the other translations of the Metamorphoses on which I’ve relied in the past, it’s as though this is of an entirely different book. The reader follows the lines with genuine emotion. And so do worlds open up—" —Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University "Stephanie McCarter’s translation offers an attractive alternative to the finest versions to appear in recent decades, while the abundance of her introductory and explanatory material gives her work a clear advantage over those predecessors. As a vehicle for serious engagement with Ovid’s poem in English, McCarter has no rival." – Richard Tarrant, Harvard University, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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Book SynopsisReordering the thematic principle of the 1985 Collected Poems, this edition returns to a book-by-book chronology and allows the reader to experience, for the first time, the full development and range of his career.

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Book Synopsis'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Text Part 3: Critical Approaches Part 4: Critical History Part 5: Background Further Reading Literacy Terms

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Book SynopsisThe unrivaled doyenne of close reading offers an interpretive introduction to Emily Dickinson's brilliant, enigmatic verse. In commentaries accompanying 150 selected poems, Helen Vendler explores Dickinson's major thematic preoccupations while highlighting the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention.Trade ReviewThe best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages. -- Seamus HeaneyThere is just no way of summarizing a critic as subtle and meticulous as [Vendler]. -- Marilyn ButlerEmily Dickinson is certainly never going to be an easy poet to understand, but her dense, poignant lyrics are now a lot more accessible to ordinary readers thanks to Vendler's unravelings. If you're going to read Dickinson, this "selected poems and commentary" is the place to start. -- Michael Dirda * Washington Post *Emily Dickinson is the sorcerer's stone. Her poetry contains, no, is, the most essential, passionate use of English and the most essential, passionate connection between the English language and nature (our nature, birds and bees nature, God's nature)...Dickinson's spare use of words are just the tip of her iceberg; the waters below contain so many secrets that it truly helps to have a guide to the meter, the myth, the thread of dreams. [And] if you're going to hire a guide, you may as well have the best, and Vendler is the best. -- Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times *This book takes 150 of [Emily Dickinson's] poems and devotes a two- or three-page chapter to each. If you have a favorite poem, you look it up and Vendler will walk you through it as if you've never read it before. It's like reading the poem in italics. -- Billy Collins * New York Post *Both casual readers and scholars of Dickinson alike will want to purchase it. -- Stacy Russo * Library Journal *If it's been a while since you last sat down with Dickinson, now is a great time: Helen Vendler's new book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, is both an anthology (it contains 150 of Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems) and an interpretive introduction, with a short essay following and explaining each poem. Vendler is almost certainly the best poetry critic in America, and she's hit upon a great way of writing about poetry. Reading each poem, followed by Vendler's commentary, it feels like you're in your own private poetry class. -- Josh Rothman * Boston Globe *[A] superb and invigorating new selection of 150 poems and probing commentaries...The poet that Vendler finds in these poems is an ambitious and sometimes magisterial artist of extraordinary range and verbal control. Vendler's comprehensive reassessment of Dickinson's achievement seems to me the most challenging new reading of Dickinson since the poet Adrienne Rich's remarkable essay "Vesuvius at Home" (1975)...What Vendler, perhaps the most skilled and accomplished close reader of lyric poetry of her generation, adds to this picture is a renewed attention to Dickinson's deliberate and consummate artistry, along with a fresh way to read cryptic poems that may seem, superficially, to have little to do with the "maelstrom" of human emotions. -- Christopher Benfey * New York Review of Books *The reigning doyenne of American poetry criticism is a close reader par excellence. [Vendler] loves her favorite poets unstintingly. She seems to think and feel in their language--to think and feel through their work, as through a membrane. Her Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries plays exactly to her strengths, as did her 1997 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets...What I like best about Vendler's Dickinson is its can-do attitude. Yes, it assures the reader, the poem says what you think it says: trust your own eyes, experience, and heart...She doesn't try to quash the mystery of the poems; she notes their ambiguities but by and large leaves those to do their work--and leaves us closer to a canonical poet whom we are still only coming to know. -- Lorin Stein * Harper's *Dickinson continues to entertain and enlighten me. Vendler manages to clarify and illuminate Dickinson's poetry without oversimplifying the work of a complex mind. Her succinct but astute readings of Emily Dickinson's poetry are little kernels of insight into a wickedly keen poetic mind. -- Hillary Kelly * New Republic *This year Helen Vendler published her own selection of Dickinson's verse along with astute commentary. After reading Dickinson's fifty or seventy-five best poems you realize that few poets have written this many poems of this much merit. Dickinson's manuscripts show that she left behind multiple variations on words and phrases, sometimes as many as a dozen, without favoring a particular one. Vendler points out moments when Dickinson wrote one word, only to bracket it and replace it with another. Not since Vendler's meticulous commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets has a finer book of close-readings been published. -- Jeannie Vanasco * Lapham's Quarterly *What Vendler did for Shakespeare's sonnets, she has done again for Dickinson's poems, demonstrating her refined skill and rare gift for loving attentiveness. When our age of hurry and perspiration threatens close reading, Vendler helps us slow down--way down until meter, word choice, punctuation, metaphors, tone, and allusion matter. She deftly reveals that form is as much a carrier of meaning as content. -- Christopher Benson * First Things *These commentaries on a selection of Dickinson's poems are best summed up in one word: brilliant. Skeptics who might be inclined to question whether anyone has anything new to say about Dickinson's oeuvre nearly 125 years after her death will find that the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Vendler manages to offer original, insightful observations about Dickinson's humor, her pain, her metaphysical abstractions, and her syntactical inversions. -- D. D. Knight * Choice *Vendler's commentaries are enlightening and enjoyable revelations of Dickinson's often elusive meanings; she is also a master of the technical and devotes consistent attention to the poet's metrical skills and innovations. -- Maurice Earls * Dublin Review of Books *This new book is as meticulous as Vendler's commentary on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997). As well as their mysterious inner lives, these are poets who share an ability to compress the maximum force into the fewest words. In Dickinson's case, her manuscripts show that she left behind multiple variations on words and phrases, sometimes as many as a dozen, without any indication of favoring one over the others. She claimed that her closest companion was her lexicon. -- Jeannie Vanasco * Times Literary Supplement *Helen Vendler provides clear commentary, uncluttered by fashionable and hyphenated literary theory, on 150 poems by one of the most enigmatic American poets. -- Elizabeth Hoover * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisIn 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.Trade ReviewThis book is a great achievement, the work of an author with an almost devout passion for good poems, a passion that the academy has not succeeded in killing. -- Frank Kermode * New Republic *Helen Vendler discloses, with great patience and ingenuity, how similarly adequate to the perceived splendor and urgency of the sonnets are their rhetorical conventions, devices that "work" as multifariously for lyric poetry as the stage contrivances of the Elizabethan (and Jacobean) theater did for the plays...Vendler is confident that "the sonnets will remain intelligible, moving and beautiful to contemporary and future readers." They will, if such readers also read Vendler's book. For hers is the most intricately inquiring and ingeniously responding study of these poems yet to be undertaken...Hers will prove to be the most valuable critical performance in recent American literature on classic texts...The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is an authentic act of contemporary criticism as well as a reading of the most cherished lyric poetry in the English language. It constitutes a ground of poetic apprehension that cannot be gainsaid, and it offers the opportunity to enjoy the art of poetry where we all agree it must be found, as one enjoys most what one understands best. -- Richard Howard * New York Times Book Review *Reading the sonnets knowing that Ms. Vendler is about to have her say serves to sharpen your awareness of the poetry considerably. In fact, with her reading over your shoulder, so to speak, you see deeper into the poetry than ever before. Each essay forces you to reread the sonnet under discussion and come a little closer to understanding this guy Shakespeare in the poem. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt * New York Times *Helen Vendler...has produced here what is probably the least irrelevant and most critically illuminating of all extended commentaries on the Sonnets. -- John Bayley * New York Review of Books *A few pages of this marvelous study convince us that "no poet ever found more linguistic forms to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets." * The Guardian *This eagerly awaited work has been nine years coming, an understandable period considering the magnitude of Helen Vendler's project...In her valuable introduction, Vendler declares that the sonnets represent "the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean lines left open to scrutiny." Readers like me, who thought they were relatively familiar with these poems, will discover just how unfamiliar their various sequences turn out to be…It is consistent with Vendler's total immersion in the sonnets that she has learned them all by heart, as an enabling means of support for the 'evidential' criticism--in which "instant and sufficient linguistic evidence" is produced to back up every critical remark--she so unfailingly and brilliantly practices. -- William H. Pritchard * Boston Sunday Globe *Helen Vendler's long study of the art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action...Reading it is like being offered a huge plate of oysters, or doing a Spot-the-Ball competition, or playing obsessively with a Rubik's Cube that always comes out right after the effort of following a tight technical argument...It is Vendler's supreme critical virtue that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making...Again and again, I want to haul out examples of this supreme critical imagination at work, but it should be apparent that criticism of the Sonnets, and by extension, critical accounts of poetry, will never be the same again. This is an epic, innovatory study which ought to mark a new beginning for criticism. -- Tom Paulin * London Review of Books *From time to time, a work of criticism appears that promises to inaugurate a new phase of the art...Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Stephen Greenblatt: each heralded, in different ways, a paradigm shift in critical practice. And now Helen Vendler...makes a bold attempt to change criticism again. Her ambitious chef d'oeuvre, the fruit of decades of memorizing and meditating on Shakespeare's Sonnets, significantly takes the form of a critical commentary...She has chosen her topic strategically. The Sonnets is the supreme lyric masterpiece in English, yet, although often edited, it has been neglected critically, as if too challenging and demanding, too dangerous for direct response. Yet Vendler's originality goes further. For she has decided to return criticism to the study of art; to the sort of response that leads to appreciative evaluation rather than manipulation...The rapid adumbration of Shakespeare's variety is as brilliant as anything Vendler has written. But in commenting on each individual sonnet in turn, she surpasses herself, again and again making fresh observations on poems we thought familiar. In almost any other critic this would be a tour de force. But in her it is simply honest empiricism, free from any agenda but that of being receptive. -- Alastair Fowler * Times Literary Supplement *The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler is a superb close reading of the sonnets one by one. It is also an invaluable master class on how to read a poem, how to attend to the patterns of sound within a poem, how to explore the way in which sense and sound combine in the sonnets. -- Colm Tóibín * Times Literary Supplement *[The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is] a heady journey into the sounds, structures, and strategies of the sonnets, led by a guide as perceptive and rigorously instructive as one could wish for...Anyone glancing at just a few of the essays will benefit from Vendler's microscopic examinations. To read the book from start to finish, however, is to receive a thorough education in how to look at a poem. One feels that when Shakespeare wrote the line, 'A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,' he hoped one day for a reader who would see in this image what Vendler sees: 'the emotionally labile contents of any sonnet as they preserve their mobility within the transparent walls of prescribed length, meter, and rhyme.' This outstanding work of criticism has made those walls and what lies behind them very clear. -- Robert Atwan * Boston Review *[Featured in "The Globe 100" for 1998]Vendler stresses Shakespeare's hyperconsciousness as a writer, a quality she seems to share. She approaches her detailed study with the utter scrupulousness of a true scholar, explicating the poems as poems. Her strict emphasis on poetics and her thoroughness separate her study from its predecessors. -- Philippa Sheppard * Toronto Globe and Mail *Though intricate and technical, Vendler's analysis of the sonnets is never boring...Her meticulous structures of analysis are a gift: They quietly allow one's own interpretive faculty to rise. By clearing up all the mechanical obstacles to understanding, your own apprehension of the poem emerges whole, and you've only to recognize it...Vendler's myriad attentions to the minute patterning of words and sounds yield...mysterious glories. She diligently, even stringently, employs her technical surveys, and what emerges from beneath their grid is surprising, substantial, evanescent. -- Mona Simpson * Los Angeles Times *Vendler has lived with these works all her life, and spent much of the past nine years working on this hefty book. The result is more than a reliable guide, it is a portable critical encyclopedia...In short, this is just the book for anybody wishing to spend a little quality time with our greatest poet. * Washington Post *Vendler's careful and sympathetic examination of the poems' organizing principles (such as the 'strategies of unfolding' that Shakespeare uses to shift a sonnet's emotional terrain, sometimes repeatedly, as the poem proceeds) yields surprising insights...Vendler proposes that her book serve as a supplement to annotated texts such as the Penguin and the Yale editions, but she is probably selling herself short. Her volume is fuller than the Penguin, and more inviting than Stephen Booth's impressive but rather forbidding Yale edition. A reader who has never tried the sonnets in their entirety, or at least looked at them in college, would have no trouble with this engaging and enlightening edition. -- Gregory Feeley * Philadelphia Inquirer *[The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets] adds enormously to our understanding and prods us to continue to make our own discoveries…[It] grafts new feathers onto the wings of our understanding, lifting us closer to Heaven's gate, and it once more confirms Vendler's status as one of the smartest critics around. -- Jay Ragoff * Books in Review *[Best of 1998 issue]If you are a writer who still uses English words (rather than chockablock bricks of jargon), this is the book for you. Professor Vendler takes Shakespeare's sonnets one by one and word by word. She talks about what poems do and how they do it--their architecture, narrative, music, and language--so, along with the aperçus and sharp insights, there are nifty charts and graphs. There is also a CD of Vendler reading the sonnets aloud [available with the hardcover edition only], lest we forget that words are noise as well as ink -- Dave Hickey * Artforum *Vendler has created an exhaustive and wonderful work on Shakespeare's sonnets...This study will become a standard work and is essential for all academic libraries. -- Teresa Berry * Library Journal *Close readings that train a brilliant spotlight on Shakespeare's poetic performance...A celebrated and prolific critic, reviewer, and lecturer on poetry, Vendler offers an illuminating companion for Bardolators of all levels and stripes...Vendler analyzes each sonnet in turn (they appear in both original and modernized formats), explicating in an accessible manner the structures that organize them...An immensely enriching account of Shakespeare's complex verse: readings whose perspicuity and accuracy will form a solid basis for many more. * Kirkus Reviews *With admirable self-reliance and hardly a glance at the main stream of historical and gender-studies criticism, the famed Harvard professor reads the poems pragmatically, as 'verbal contraptions,' explaining how and why they work the way they do. The result is not just a few brilliant perceptions about, say, Shakespeare's use of clichés or chiasmus (although those are here), but the best teachers' edition on the market. Vendler's preface, and the essays that accompany each sonnet...will make a nearly perfect introduction for college students--or for anyone else who wants to learn how to read the poems for their skill and originality. * Publishers Weekly *There is so much more to these sonnets than meets the eye, Vendler's insights into their poetics are more than useful: they are indispensable. -- Tom Mayo * Dallas Morning News *[A] magisterial work...[and] an invaluable contribution to the serious study of Shakespeare's sonnets by a preeminent critic of lyric poetry, widely viewed as the best close reader of poetry writing today. -- Michael Shinagel * Harvard Review *Table of Contents* Conventions of Reference * Introduction * The Sonnets * Appendix 1: Key Words * Appendix 2: Defective Key Words * Words Consulted * Index of First Lines

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Book SynopsisJerome Mazzaro examines Dante's Vita Nuova as an artistic correlative to what Dante conceived as an image of himself. Specifically, he explores the structure of the work in relation to medieval views of memory, self, music, form, and interpretation, and against the facts of Dante's life and culture as we have come to know them. Originally publisheTable of Contents*FrontMatter, pg. i*CONTENTS, pg. vii*Preface, pg. ix*CHAPTER ONE: The Vita Nuova and the "New" Poet, pg. 1*CHAPTER TWO: The Vita Nuova and the Literature of Self, pg. 27*CHAPTER THREE: The Architecture of the Vita Nuova, pg. 51*CHAPTER FOUR: The Prose of the Vita Nuova, pg. 71*CHAPTER FIVE: The "Dante" of the Vita Nuova, pg. 95*CHAPTER SIX: The Vita Nuova and Subsequent Poetic Autobiography, pg. 117*Bibliography, pg. 139*Index, pg. 147

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Book SynopsisThis book traces the great tradition of English translations of Homer, focusing in particular on the contributions of Chapman, Pope, E.V. Rieu and Christopher Logue.

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Book SynopsisIn this book, John Woolford specifies the precise meaning and scope of 'the grotesque' by placing Browning in a major aesthetic tradition running from the Romantic Sublime through to modern concepts and theorisations of the grotesque, such as the Bakhtinian.

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Book SynopsisAllen Ginsberg occupies a significant and enduring position in American literature. Following Ginsberg''s death in 1997, Barry Miles has drawn on both his long friendship with the poet and on Ginsberg''s journals and correspondence to produce an immensely readable account of one of the twentieth century''s most extraordinary poets.Trade ReviewThis is a scholarly work and also much fun. * Guardian *Will surely be consulted as an Ur-text for decades to come. Read it at the end, along with Ginsberg's fifteen best books, and you'll know why he matters. -- Michael Horowitz * Sunday Times *Skilfully evokes the poet's childhood, authoritatively expresses his opinions on sundry matters of later life and work, gives him his due as lifeforce of youthful rebellion and in the 1960s counter. Read it; you'll enjoy yourself. -- Paul Berman * New York Times *Concentrating on the simultaneity of the public and private in Ginsberg's life, Miles gives us a richer insight into his poetic value - and a better read - than many a tight-lipped critical filleting. -- Saul Frampton * Time Out *

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