Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisBringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.Trade Review"Situating early modern poetry in conversation with Lucretius and Lacan, The Environmental Unconscious resists conventional critical distinctions between linguistic and materialist turns. Steven Swarbrick argues that matter, no less than the unconscious, is structured like a language: lively nonhuman matter, no less than the disembodied Cartesian cogito, is characterized by loss and self-estrangement. Because early modern poets take the environmental unconscious as the model for human desire (rather than vice-versa), Swarbrick shows, this body of work offers an overlooked yet urgent mode of theorizing life beyond the human."—Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania"An overdue methodological detour from historicist business as usual, this sharply original book binds Spenser and Derrida, Ralegh and Glissant, Marvell and Deleuze, and Freud and Milton into vivid new relationships. Steven Swarbrick’s ‘environmental unconscious’—a structurally consequential but radically inhospitable alterity lodged within both conceptions of matter and their literary analogues—drives thrilling new readings of early modern literature as it renews the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis for thinking poetic form."—Drew Daniel, author of Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

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Book Synopsis Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood - primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound's intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound's extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound's interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound's contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds' occultism and its implications to his [Pounds'] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.

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Book Synopsis Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott's poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott's artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for ""The Canadian Authors Meet,"" ""W.L.M.K,"" and ""Laurentian Shield,"" but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure. The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott's work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively. Trade Review``Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground is a fine pick for any world poetry collection, much recommended.'' -- Midwest Bookwatch, The Poetry Shelf, December 2011, 201201``With Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground, the Laurier Poetry series certainly seems to have fulfilled its mandate. There is the hope that more readers will encounter F.R. Scott, an artist who gives a poetic voice to political concerns that are evermore relevant, and who, when he's at his best, writes the kind of poetry you'd like to memorize.'' -- Vanessa Bonneau -- Montreal Review of Books, May 7, 2012, 201206``Scott's poetry humbly argues for a place on our shelves for a Canadian political poetry that is large enough to avoid the petty debate on specifics, yet particular enough not to lose local force.'' -- Andrew Vaisius -- Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012, 201210Table of Contents Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss Foreword Neil Besner Biographical Note Introduction Laura Moss Overture Laurentian Shield Coelacanth Orangerie My Amoeba Is Unaware Mural Lakeshore A Grain of Rice Incident at May Pond Miranda Trans Canada To Certain Friends Social Notes I, 1932 Social Notes II, 1935 Lest We Forget For R.A.S. 1925-1943 W.L.M.K. The Canadian Social Register The Canadian Authors Meet Bonne Entente Brébeuf and His Brethren All the Spikes But the Last Saturday Sundae Martinigram A Lass in Wonderland Picture in ""Life"" On Kanbawza Road On the Death of Gandhi For Bryan Priestman Last Rites Ushering in the Quiet Revolution Audacity Fort Smith A New City: E3 On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall Villanelle for Our Time Afterword: Reading ""Canon"" Scott's Canon George Elliot Clarke Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisIndigenous Poetics in Canada broadens the way in which Indigenous poetry is examined, studied, and discussed in Canada. Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place. Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.Trade Review"'Indigenous Poetics in Canada' is that rare book of scholarship that speaks to the heart and spirit as well as the mind. The selections in this collection offer powerful individual and collective insight into the ways that diverse traditions of Indigenous poetics animate our imaginative possibilities and extend our cultural understandings across time, space, and difference. To study Indigenous poetics is to be forcefully reminded of both our historical traditions and their continuing significance, and the poets, writers, scholars, and story-makers featured in this volume are among the most eloquent and insightful voices on the topic today. This is a transformative intervention in Indigenous literary studies as well as the broader canon of Canadian literature, reminding us that questions of aesthetics are always in dynamic relationship with the lived experience of our politicized imaginations in the world." -- Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, University of British Columbia"Conversations about Indigenous literatures will be forever enriched by this stunning new collection. Here, the leading voices in Indigenous literary studies draw upon deep currents of inspiration--both ancient and contemporary--as they reflect upon and powerfully perform the act of re-making the world through language. Joyful, humbling, and wonderfully diverse, 'Indigenous Poetics in Canada' welcomes readers and writers into a re-indigenized rhetorical landscape-and I cannot wait to see what takes place there." -- Keavy Martin, Department of English and Film, University of Alberta; author of 'Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature' (2012)``In a fine introduction, McLeod does an admirable job of framing the essays and interviews to come while giving readers less familiar with indigenous poetics insight into some of the tropes and rhetorical strategies practitioners use, including kiskino ('things...pointed to, but never completely articulated'), kakêskihkêmowina ('counselling narratives'), and aniskwâcimopicikêwin ('the process of connecting stories together'). That this collection exists is at once a challenge to the white publishing world that has long refused to recognize indigenous poetic practices as 'poetry' and a testament to the health and vibrancy of the living word of indigenous consciousness.... Summing up: Highly recommended.'' -- B. Carson, Bridgewater State University -- Choice, December 2014, 201412Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Indigenous Poetics in Canada , edited by Neal McLeod Introduction | Neal McLeod Poetics of Memory 1 Achimo | Duncan Mercredi 2 Interview with Armand Garnet Ruffo | Conducted by Neal McLeod 3 Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement | Warren Cariou 4 Pauline Passed Here | Janet Marie Rogers 5 Writer-Reader Reciprocity and the Pursuit of Alliance through Indigenous Poetry | Sam McKegney 6 Remembering the Poetics of Ancient Sound kistêsinâw/wîsahkêcâhk's maskihkiy (Elder Brother's Medicine) | Tasha Beeds 7 On Reading Basso | David Newhouse 8 The Pemmican Eaters | Marilyn Dumont 9 Cree Poetic Discourse | Neal McLeod Poetics of Place 10 âBubbling Like a Beating Heartâ: Reflections on Nishnaabeg Poetic and Narrative Consciousness | Leanne Simpson 11 Getting (Back) to Poetry: A Memoir | Daniel David Moses 12 Kwadây KwaÅdur-Our Shagóon | Alyce Johnson 13 âPimuteuat/ Ils marchent/ They Walkâ: A Few Observations on Indigenous Poetry and Poetics in French | Michèle Lacombe 14 Iskigamizigan (The Sugarbush): A Poetics of Decolonization | Waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy 15 The Power of Dirty Waters: Indigenous Poetics | Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair 16 A Poetics of Place and Apocalypse: Conflict and Contradiction in Poetry of the Red River Resistance and the Northwest Resistance | Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber 17 My Poem Is an Indian Woman | Rosanna Deerchild Poetics of Performance 18 Interview with Marvin Francis | Conducted by Rosanna Deerchild and Shayla Elizabeth 19 Blood Moves with UsâStory Poetry Lives Inside | Janet Rogers 20 Revitalizing Indigenous Swagger: Poetics from a Plains Cree Perspective | Lindsay âEekwolâ Knight 21 A Conversation of Influence, Tradition, and Indigenous Poetics: An Interview with Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm | Conducted by Rhiannon Johnson 22 The âNerve of Cree,â the Pulse of Africa: Sound Identities in Cree, Cree-Métis, and Dub Poetries in Canada | Susan Gingell 23 Poetics of Renewal: Indigenous PoeticsâMessage or Medium? | Lillian Allen Poetics of Medicine 24 Indigenous Poetry and the Oral | Lee Maracle 25 Poems as Healing Bundles | Gregory Scofield 26 Small Birds/Songs Out of Silence | Joanne Arnott 27 Stretching through Our Watery Sleep: Feminine Narrative Retrieval of cihcipistikwân in Louise Halfe's The Crooked Good | Lesley Belleau 28 âLearning to Listen to a Quiet Way of Tellingâ: A Study of Cree Counselling Discourse Patterns in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed | Gail MacKay About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisExamines the departure from meter and rhyme in modern poetry and the increased use of free verse

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Book SynopsisHatif Janabi’s poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States.The speaker in many of Janabi’s poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.

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Book SynopsisIn Food for the Winter,Geraldine Connolly recovers the lost world of childhood in the years ofsmall-town America following World War II. The prevailing imagery is that offire, the fire of bombing recollected, the fire of Roman Catholicism, of riflesand steel mills, candles and cigarettes, fires both intellectual and physical,fires of emotion and spirit. Connolly's collection fixes the past and itslosses in place then moves from girlhood themes into the emergence of womanhoodand its passions. The book's real subject is love and the rich and variedpossibilities of human relationships. The rites of passages become more thanthose of an individual life, achieving an identity that both records aparticular moment in time yet transcends a particular human body and names usall as suffers of experience and enjoyers of perceptions.

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Book SynopsisThis important new critical biography traces in carefully considered detail what is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's personal life while exploring the fascinating relationship between the man of affairs, who made so many 'improvisations and accommodations' to ensure his own survival, and the poet. A major reexamination of England's greatest narrative poet, it is supplemented with reproductions of Chaucer portraits and other illustrations, including maps of medieval England.Trade Review"Few can write so interestingly, fewer Chaucerians." Notes and Queries "In this rich and comprehensive book, Professor Pearsall combines his expert knowledge of modern Chaucer scholarship and criticism with a refreshing directness in expressing his own opinions. He sees the same `aloof and uncomitted' spirit in Chaucer's poems as in his career; and it is hard to believe that there will ever be a more coherent and convincing account of the life and works of this elusive poet." J. A. Burrow "... highly readable, built on a sound scholarly base with wit and judgment...." Derek Brewer "... it is the merit of Pearsall's book that he returns England's first true poet to the muddle, viciousness and disorder of 14th-century London. He insists continually that we divest ourselves of modern preoccupations... in order to see Chaucer as he was." Peter Ackroyd, The Times "An excellent account." Peter Ackroyd The Times "The life-records are expertly interpreted in terms of social history. The works are placed in their generic frames, and discussed in probable order of composition through the life. The criticism, if at times it has to be summary, is sturdy, candid and well-judged. The scholarship is masterly, that is, unobtrusive, and the lively exposition free from old academic vices, and from modern ones." English "Rife with insights into both the poet's life and his work, this superb book can introduce undergraduates to Chaucer and yet also provide much for seasoned critics and scholars to ponder and debate. A fine reference for the life, times, and works. A must for all libraries." Choice "Is a pleasure to read. An excellent book by a distinguished scholar." Notes and Queries "Pearsall has solved, with elegance and precision, the problem of writing on things which have not only often been considered before, but also frequently discussed." Buchbesprechungen "Pearsall's writing is marked by its firm reasonableness and humour and a confident awareness of contemporary critical thought, and his studies of Chaucer's literary experiments and enquiries as he turned from one visionary poem to another form some of the most stimulating pages of this book." Southern Humanities Review "Often hilarious, by turns, enlightening and provocative. It can be read and appreciated on several levels, as a detailed history of the period, as textual history, and as literary criticism as well as biography." Modern Law Review "Any book-length biography of Chaucer has to be the product of a highly creative imagination, for very little is known about the poets life. This one, highly readable, is fleshed out with a little history and a lot of intelligent and perceptive literary criticism." Sunday Telegraph "Excellent on Chaucer both as a creative writer and a public administrator." The Observer "It is hard to imagine how Derek Pearsall's fine 'critical biography' of Chaucer could be superseded. It will, however, enrage most people some of the time, and some people most of the time; but all for the right reasons. Its originality lies in its refusal to speculate. Pearsall refuses to join the game of invention. Nor will he refashion Chaucer to his own preferred image... this book is a delight to read." Review of English StudiesTable of ContentsList of figures and illustrations. List of Abbreviations. Introduction: Writing a life of Chaucer. 1. Beginnings (c.1340-1360). 2. Early Career (The 1360s). 3. Advances (The 1370s). 4. Fame (1380-1386). 5. Reversals, New Beginnings (1386-1391). 6. Renewal (The 1390s). Epilogue. Appendix I The Chaucer Portraits. Notes. List of Short Titles and Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisA study of the poet's distinctive compositional practices; Debates about editorial proprieties have been at the center of Emily Dickinson scholarship since the 1981 publication of the two-volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Many critics have since investigated the possibility that autograph poems might have primacy over their printed versions, and it has been suggested that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes are all potentially integral to any given poem's meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents. In Measures of Possibility, Domhnall Mitchell sets out to test the hypothesis of Dickinson's textual radicalism, and its consequences for readers, students, and teachers, by looking closely at features such as spacing, the physical direction of the writing, and letter-shapes in hand-written lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with a critical apparatus by which to measure the extent to which contemporary approaches to Dickinson's autograph procedures can reasonably be formulated as corresponding to the poet's own purposes.Trade ReviewIn this admirable and ambitious study, Domhnall confronts the thorny question of whether any set of editing practices can adequately represent in print the distinctive characteristics of Emily Dickinson's writing.... This book will do for our generation of Dickinson scholars what Franklin's The Editing of Emily Dickinson did in the wake of the Johnson edition, but it will draw a lot more attention because editing issues now claim a tremendous amount of attention in ways that force everyone who proposes to write on Dickinson (or perhaps even to teach her poems) to arrive at some sort of considered justification for individual choices. This will be an important and timely book - and a controversial one. - Jane Donahue Eberwein, editor of An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia; ""Domhnall Mitchell's critical persona is witty and humane, engaging and astute.... the book is sure to have a major impact on Dickinson studies and on editorial politics and practices further afield."" - Vivian Pollak, author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender

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Book SynopsisThis book is a source of quick reference containing basic and up-to-date information on the poet's life, her art, the manuscripts, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship in general. For ease of use, individual essays have been structured as follows: Each essay provides a historical overview of the relevant issues under scrutiny. The essays offer detailed discussions of important aspects pertaining of the fields in question. Unlike encyclopedic entries, each of the several essays reflects the authors own perspective, presenting a distinct point of view, at times a controversial one. Trade ReviewThis book presents the most exhaustive and useful summary of Emily Dickinson scholarship in the 20th century-a series of short but amazingly comprehensive essays on almost every aspect of Dickinson studies, written especially for this volume by Dickinson's most formidable contemporary critics. Invaluable to the expert and novice alike, every page of this book is sheer pleasure, in a way comparable to few scholarly texts.-Virginia Quarterly Review; ""The best of recent Dickinson scholarship is gathered together in the multifaceted Emily Dickinson Handbook, a collection of essays that examine Dickinson's life, poetry, poetics, and social perspective.""-Booklist ""Satisfies a long-standing need in 19th-century U.S. literature studies, providing a ready reference guide with essential, up-to-date material about Dickinson's life and art, her manuscripts, and the present state of research.... Highly recommended.""-Choice; ""A single authoritative source for information about Dickinson's historical, cultural, and biographical contexts, as well as the editing and transmission of her texts, their critical reception, and the most recent interpretive, pedagogical, and theoretical approaches within Dickinson scholarship.... This book has it all.""-Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin

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Book SynopsisIndifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference-by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain of poetic indifference began to emerge. The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others-works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming ""indifferent"" in the sense of ""mediocre."" Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself. This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.Trade ReviewExtraordinary from start to finish. Once I began reading it, I continued reading it almost nonstop, even in a period full of other obligations. The book is electric in its revelations and in its quality of writing a small work of art.-Elaine Scarry, Harvard University; ""A first-rate piece of work: original, daring, witty-just very perceptive page after page. Absolutely free from jargon or pomposity or any of the afflications that beset English study.""-William H. Pritchard, Amherst College

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Book SynopsisEssays in this collection explore ways that Emily Dickinson adapted nineteenth-century epistolary conventions of women’s culture, as well as how she directed her writing to particular readers, providing subtly tactful guidance to ways of approaching her poetics.

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Book SynopsisWidely known as the winner of the 1966 National Book Award and author of the best-selling novel ""Deliverance"", James Dickey devoted himself as much to the critique of the modern literary tradition as to his participation in it. A writer enthralled by teaching, he lectured at several major universities before settling at the University of South Carolina for nearly three decades as poet-in-residence. After his death in 1997, a transcript of his lectures was found among his papers. Collected here and published for the first time, these lectures reveal judgments and appraisals Dickey would use to great effect in his teaching. They also contribute to the unraveling of Dickey's art from the larger-than-life myth that surrounded him. In a comprehensive introduction to Dickey's remarks, Donald J. Greiner evaluates the relevance of the writer's often sharply worded opinions. The volume brings to life class sessions planned and delivered soon after Dickey took up full-time residence at the University of South Carolina, in the triumphal years following his rapid succession of honours. Full of asides, witticisms and afterthoughts, the sessions suggest not the pontification of a scholar at an academic conference but the confident learning of a practicing poet who happens to enjoy being in the classroom. Clearly setting forth his sense of literary criticism, Dickey repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of the poet over the critic, the original use of language as a primary criterion for effective poetry, and the centrality of personal reaction to poetry as a measure of its value. Dickey's comments are valuable for their insight into both his own thought processes and those of the poets he reviewed, among them William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, A.E. Housman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare and Robert Bridges.

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Book SynopsisAnalysis of Whitman's reflection of civil rights legislation in his work, 1865-1876. Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis seeks to point the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's 1865-1876 publications by embedding them in the legislative discourse of black emancipation and its stormy aftermath. The supposed absence of race relations in Whitman's post-war texts has recently become a source of curiosity and denunciation. However, from 1865 to 1876, the Congressional 'workshop' was seeking to forge interracial civil rights legislation through surveillance of the implementation of such egalitarianism, as manifested in the Civil War Amendments, the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The analysis of the hegemonic shift in Whitman's implementation of his democratic poetics constitutes the innovative contribution in these pages. By welcoming ex-slaves into the Union, as well as ex-Rebel states, Whitman's Reconstruction texts enlisted his representations in the federalizing rhetoric of civil rights protection that would lapse for almost a century, before recovery in the Second Reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s.Trade ReviewAn important and constructive contribution to Whitman studies. * THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW *Mancuso...convincingly, richly, and inspiringly gives us back a strong sense of the Reconstruction Whitman. * AMERICAN STUDIES *

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Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of Pound criticism investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound remains a deeply controversial figure. Today it is hard to imagine a poet sparking national debate, but Pound did just that. His receipt in 1949 of the first-ever Bollingen Award for Poetry started a hue and cry that spread to every US periodical that made even a pretense of following "cultural" issues: even Time weighed in. It took two years for things to simmer down, and when they finally did, literary study looked profoundly different. Everyone engaged in the study of poetry today, professors and students alike, works in an environment shaped by that national crisis of conscience. The present book considers this untold story, and investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. It is routine for reception histories to distinguish between professional studies and more popular responses; this book encourages us to consider why we make that distinction and what the costs of doing so might be. Unprofessional responses to Pound have often been ideologically and politically embarrassing for Pound scholars, who have in response policed the distinction between professional and popular readings with extraordinary vigilance. As a result, the history of Pound's reception unfolds as a kind of drama-perhaps the last ongoing theater for McCarthyite cultural-political anxieties.Trade ReviewAs seasoned scholars with a mature capacity for untangling skeins of fact and weaving narrative, considering the big picture steadily and whole, Coyle and Preda have developed a magnificent achievement making sense of (and offering a very legible map of) this Poundian world and its major driving vortices. Above all, beyond the controversies and gossip, the cliques, the frequent masculinism, the eccentricity and sometime crankishness, they rightly feature the work of scholarship-the courageous and generous achievement of generations of Pound scholars who always moved to a different rhythm, stubborn against the grain of mainstream academia. * MODERNITY *While this study is valuable for retracing the history of modernism's acceptance in the academy, its exhaustive and far-reaching scope also allows one to move freely in the midst of the wider intellectual context surrounding and permeating both Pound Studies and the manifold, controversial aspects of literary criticism both in and out of the academic milieu. * Make It New *Table of ContentsPreface From Wabash to Washington, 1907-1947 A Prize Fight and Institutionalization, 1948-1951 Kenner, Watts, and Professional Attention, 1951-1961 Sailing after Knowledge, 1962-1971 The Pound Era and Its Monumental Companion, 1971-1985 Ezra Pound Studies and the Postmodern Turn, 1980-1990 Reading Ezra Pound in the New Millennium, 1990-2016 The Many Lives of Ezra Pound: Biographies and Memoirs, 1960-2015 Periodicals on Ezra Pound, 1954-2017 Conclusion Chronology of the Bollingen Controversy Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExamines the image of the US in German poetry and the reception and influence of American poetry in Germany since 1945. This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam, 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann, Kunert, and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally, Divers looks at poems by Hartung, Delius, and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s, and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry, Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding, not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Gregory Divers is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.Trade ReviewDivers's book is a good resource for those studying both modern and postmodern German poetry. His research is especially valuable because it offers a look into a number of recent decades and their influences on German poets. * CHOICE *For the reader seeking a deeper understanding of this fascinating intercultural relationship, one that lends itself to enthusiastic discussion in the German language and literature classroom, Divers' study is highly recommended. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *... will figure as a precious contribution to the research of national German poetry, carried out with the utmost care and including always well-substantiated, at times even brilliant close readings. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *... [A] meticulous examination of how and to whatdegree German postwar poetry absorbs US-Americanculture.... [It] will figure as a precious contribution to the research of national German poetry, carried out with utmost care and including always well-substantiated, at times even brilliant, close readings. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *Table of ContentsIntroduction Pfannkuchen, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Harlem: How Do You Like America? Prejudice, Problems, Fragments: Early Postwar Reception of American Poetry The 1960s: Jazz Beats Rhythms of Change O Taste and See the Projective Verse: Höllerer's "Thesen zum langen Gedicht" und Vietnam und Erich Fried: American and the German Political Poem of the 1960s Kilroy Was Here: How Vietnam Changed the Image of America Fiedler Crosses the Border, Brinkmann Closes the Gap: The Origins of German Pop Poetry Travel Destination America: Image and Influence through the mid-1970s Casting Light on Mr. Hopper's America: From the Late 1970s through the 1980s After the Wall: Luftbrücke und heavy metal sounzz Conclusion: Imago America Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIlluminates the major aspects of the works of Germany's greatest 20th-century poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the best-known German poet of his generation and is widely appreciated today by readers in Europe, the United States, and world-wide. Because of the inventiveness and musicality of his poetic language and the visionary intuition of his thinking, Rilke's influence extends well beyond poetry to include religion, philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts. His works have been widely translated into English, and new enderings of such poem cycles as The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus appear frequently. Critics regard Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as a seminal modern novel. The Companion to Rilke provides essential, up-to-date essays by top Rilke scholars on a wide range of the major aspects of Rilke's life and works. The volume follows the chronology of Rilke's career, emphasizing those works that have met with the greatest critical interest. Among the topics covered are: Rilke's life and thought; the writings before 1902; Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder; the Neue Gedichte, The Cornet and other brief narratives; Malte Laurids Brigge; The Duino Elegies; The Sonnets to Orpheus; Rilke as a poet in French; Rilke and the visual arts. Erika and Michael Metzger (SUNY Buffalo) have written extensively on various aspects ofGerman literature and have edited significant Baroque texts.Trade ReviewAn author as intriguing and complex as Rilke has many facets, and the 11 essays in this volume attest to the wealth of possible approaches. * CHOICE *Editors and authors are all renowned Rilke specialists. The broad scope of their academic experience, careers, and area of critical activity guarantees the extremely high level of interest that this book evokes. * ARBITRIUM *The ten essays by eminent Rilke scholars succeed in their intent to move toward a new image of Rilke. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *This study is a wonderful, animated text, a lovely tribute to the poet's great humanity, and it should be included in any study of Rilke. * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *The cosmopolitan solitary is shown against the background of a developing modernistic culture, to which [Rilke] substantially contributed. The authors show profound insight into the many problems raised ... by work which combines the ineffable with the physical. * MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *...provides an important correction to popular views of Rilke as 'a visionary visited by muses and angels. * MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH *

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Book SynopsisRilke's great cycle of ten elegies, perhaps his most profound poetic achievement, had its inception on the morning of January 21, 1912, but was interrupted by the First World War and not completed until a decade later. The Duino Elegies are not only the result of an extraordinary kind of contact with the unseen world; they are an attempt to understand that world in its holistic relationship to the visible, tangible world. This powerful rendering ofthe cycle is a product of the collaboration between a poet, Norris, and a Germanist, Keele.

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Book SynopsisA collection of new essays treating the most important aspects of the work of the most famous late Romantic, Heinrich Heine. As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalistideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; European culture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Höhn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters. Roger F. Cook is Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.Trade ReviewUnusual for the range it provides. * CHOICE *...presents intellectually rigorous essays geared to graduate students and scholars.... In sum, this anthology provides the reader with well-written articles reflecting the current concerns of Heine scholars, and the conceptual planning behind this Companion volume gives readers the impression that they are reading not a series of separate essays, but a well-organized book. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[An] engrossing, wide-ranging collection of essays by distinguished scholars.... These fine essays ... make us aware of how modern a poet and thinker Heine remains, how remarkably dependent, and in his own way, how free. * GOETHE YEARBOOK *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Roger F. Cook Illusions Lost and Found: The Experiential World of Heine's Buch der Lieder - Michael Perraudin A Walk on the Wild Side: Heine's Eroticism - Paul Peters The Riddle of Love: Romantic Poetry and Historical Progress - Roger F. Cook Nightingales Instead of Owls: Heine's Joyous Philosophy - Willi Goetschel Eternal Return or Indiscernable Progress? Heine Conception of History after 1848 - Gerhard Hoehn Heinrich Heine and the Discourse of Mythology - Paul Reitter Troubled Apostate: Heine's Conversion and Its Consequences - Robert C. Holub Heine and Jewish Culture: The Poetics of Appropriation - Jeffrey A. Grossman Mathilde's Interruption: Archetypes of Modernity in Heine's Later Poetry - Anthony Phelan Late Thoughts: Reconsiderations from the "Matratzengruft" - Joseph A. Kruse Heine and Weimar -

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Book SynopsisNew essays providing a in-depth view of the many facets of the great world poet's work. Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poeticworks, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany. Contributors: Steven D.Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D.Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Schiller and the New Century - Steven D. Martinson Schiller's Philosophical Aesthetics in Anthropological Perspective - Walter Hinderer Die Räuber: Structure, Models, and an Emblem - Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels Kabale und Liebe Reconsidered - James M. van der Laan On the Shores of Philosophy: Schiller's Later Lyric Poetry - Norbert Oellers Great Emotions -- Great Criminals? Schiller's Don Carlos - Rolf-Peter Janz Concerning Aesthetic Education - Lesley Sharpe Wallenstein - Dieter Borchmeyer Maria Stuart: The Physiology of Politics - Steven D. Martinson Die Jungfrau von Orleans - Karl S. Guthke Wilhelm Tell - Karl S. Guthke Schiller and Classical Antiquity - David V. Pugh Schiller the Historian - Otto Dann The Reception of Schiller in the Twentieth Century - Wulf Koepke Schiller in America: His Reception from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century - Steven D. Martinson

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Book SynopsisNew, wide-ranging essays on the controversial poet, who was both a harbinger of Modernism and a critic of modernity. Stefan George (1868-1933) is along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke one of the pre-eminent German poets of the twentieth century. He also had an important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural history. It is generally agreed that he played a significant part in the transition of German literature to Modernism, particularly in poetry. At the same time he was an outspoken critic of modernity. He believed that only anall-encompassing cultural renewal could save modern man. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although his artistic consciousness was formed by European aestheticism, his poetry and the writings that emerged from the poets and intellectuals he gathered around him in the George Circle are above all a scathing commentary on the political, social, and cultural situation in Germany at the turn of the century. George, who was imbued with the idea of the poet as a prophet and priest, saw himself as the Messiah of a New Hellenism and a New Reich led by an intellectual and aesthetic elite consisting of men who were bonded together through their allegiance to a charismatic leader. Some of the values that George proclaimed, among them a glorification of power, of heroism and self-sacrifice, were seized upon by the National Socialists, and subsequently his writings andthose of his circle were considered by some to be proto-fascist. It did not help his reputation that after the Second World War much of the criticism of his works was practiced by uncritical, hagiographic George worshippers. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed and unbiased interest among scholars and critics in George and his circle. The wide-ranging and original essays in this volume explore anew George's poetry and his contribution to Modernism, the relation between his vision of a New Reich and fascist ideology, and his importance as a cultural critic. Jens Rieckmann is Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine.Trade ReviewThe wise plan of the book is well realized: those who would like to be introduced to the world of Stefan George -- and not just in the Anglo-Saxon realm -- will find in the Companion a well-versed guide. * CASTRUM PEREGRINI *This collection of nine essays is a rare addition to George scholarship in English. The editor's introduction gives welcome attention to George's early years... as well as an account of the George-Kreis, the troubled relationship with Hofmannsthal, and the poet's encounter with Maximin. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *The Companion provides an accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's works for Anglo-American readers. * MLR, 2006 *An accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's works.... * MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH *[P]rovides an accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's work for Anglo-American readers. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Jens Rieckmann Stefan George's Poetics - William Waters Stefan George's Early Works 1890-1895 - Robert Vilain In Praise of Illusion: Das Jahr der Seele and Der Teppich des Lebens - Karla L. Schultz In Zeiten der Wirren: Stefan George's Later Works - Michael Metzger Stefan George and Two Types of Aestheticism - Jeffrey Todd Master and Disciple: The George Circle - Michael Winkler Stefan George and the Munich Cosmologists - Paul Bishop George, Nietzsche, and Nazism - Ritchie Robertson Übergeschlechtliche Liebe: Stefan George's Concept of Love - Marita Keilson-Lauritz

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Book SynopsisA re-examination of the George Circle in the cultural and political contexts of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the most important figures in modern German culture. His poetry, in its originality and impact, has been ranked with that of Goethe and Hölderlin. Yet George's reach extended beyond the sphereof literature. In the early 1900s, he gathered around himself a circle of disciples who subscribed to his vision of comprehensive cultural-spiritual renewal and sought to turn it into reality. The ideas of the George Circle profoundly affected Germany's educated middle class, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, when their critique of bourgeois liberalism, materialism, and scholarship (Wissenschaft) as well as their call for new formsof leadership (Herrschaft) and a new Reich found wider resonance. The essays collected in the present volume critically re-examine these ideas, their contexts, and their influence. They provide new perspectives on the intersection of culture and politics in the works of the George Circle, not least its ambivalent relationship to National Socialism. Contributors: Adam Bisno, Richard Faber, Rüdiger Görner, Peter Hoffmann, Thomas Karlauf, Melissa S. Lane, Robert E. Lerner, David Midgley, Robert E. Norton, Ray Ockenden, Ute Oelmann, Martin A. Ruehl, Bertram Schefold. Melissa S. Lane is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Martin A. Ruehl is Lecturerin German Thought and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.Trade ReviewIt is the enormous service of this collection to let . . . contradictory theses and argumentations have their effect on the reader, and what is more, to have brought together authors of very different disciplines. Thereby an informative and comprehensive work has come into existence that spans a wide arc: from the lyric poetry to the Blätter-Society, science, and economics; from mythologizing to politics; from homosexuality to misogyny; from antisemitism to National Socialism. The volume delivers thusly many specific points of departure for new research into George and the George Circle, yet remains accessible to a broader readership as an advanced introduction. In its abundance this book opens to the Anglophone world a nuanced access to George the poet and the social figure. -- Max Kramer * H-GERMAN, H-NET REVIEWS *A . . . stimulating and mostly very readable volume that, it is to be wished, will not only carry forth outside Germany the extremely productive discussions there about the George Circle, but will also have an effect on them. * STEFAN GEORGE JAHRBUCH *What makes this volume . . . so eminently enjoyable is the fact that while this new crop of George scholars largely agree to ignore the ideological pitched battles that marked George's postwar reception, they agree on little else. There is a spirited debate between the different contributors, and while none of them offer the simple answers to the question of the George circle's politics that proved so seductive after 1945, they each accentuate their answers differently. * MONATSHEFTE *This volume tackles important questions. . . . [Some of the essays] provide incisive contributions to English-language research on George and the relationship between poetry, ethics, and politics. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *This book is another in a long line of excellent Camden House publications. Highly recommended. -- Mark McCulloh * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Melissa S. Lane and Martin A. Ruehl The George Circle: From Künstlergesellschaft to Lebensgemeinschaft - Ute Oelmann Stefan George's Homoerotic Erlösungsreligion, 1891-1907 - Adam Bisno The Secret Germany of Gertrud Kantorowicz - Robert Lerner The Poet as Idol: Friedrich Gundolf on Rilke and Poetic Leadership - Ruediger Goerner Kingdom of the Spirit: The Secret Germany in Stefan George's Later Poems - Ray Ockenden The Absentee Prophet: Public Perceptions of George's Poetry in the Weimar Period - David Midgley The Platonic Politics of the George Circle: A Reconsideration - Melissa S. Lane Political Economy as Geisteswissenschaft: Edgar Salin and Other Economists around George - Bertram Schefold "Imperium transcendat hominem": Reich and Rulership in Ernst Kantorowicz's Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite - Martin A. Ruehl Third Reich and Third Europe: Stefan George's Imperial Mythologies in Context - Richard Faber From Secret Germany to Nazi Germany: The Politics of Art before and after 1933 - Robert E. Norton The George Circle and National Socialism - Peter Hoffmann Stauffenberg: The Search for a Motive - Thomas Karlauf Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the past half-century's critical reassessments of one of the most-studied American poets. When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied American poets in history. Approaching Emily Dickinson provides an objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception -- an area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and students, Approaching Emily Dickinson also enables fruitful comparisons both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives. Fred D. White is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His studies of Emily Dickinson have been published in College Literature and in the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.Trade ReviewWhite's comprehensive and engaging book so effectively unites a balanced assessment of relevant scholarship with insight into prevailing trends that it is destined to become essential reading for both students coming to Dickinson for the first time and scholars long familiar with the field of Dickinson studies. White helps experienced scholars acknowledge those whose work has made their own thought possible at the same time that he provides those new to Dickinson with a lively sense of the expanding panorama of interpretive possibilities that continues to define the field of Dickinson scholarship. -- Paul Crumbley, Utah State University, president of The Emily Dickinson International SocietyFred White's survey of Dickinson scholarship since 1960 is an essential resource for both long-term readers of Dickinson and those coming to her work for the first time. Readers interested in knowing how Dickinson criticism developed from 1960 to the present will find this book a highly informative and stimulating read. * THE EMILY DICKINSON JOURNAL *Table of ContentsIntroduction Approaching Dickinson's Rhetoric, Poetics and Stylistics Trends in Dickinson Biography and Biographical/Psychoanalytic Criticism The Feminist Revolution in Dickinson Crticism The Manuscripts of a Non-Print Poet Dickinson in Cultural Context: Principal Critical Insights Dickinson's Poetic Spirituality Scholarship on Archetypal and Philosophical Themes in Dickinson's Poetry Reassesing Dickinson's Poetic Project: A Postmodern Perspective Emily Dickinson in Belles Lettres, Music, and Art Concluding Reflections Selected Editions of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Lettres Works Cited Index Index of First Lines

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Book SynopsisThe poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abhorring its perception as an esoteric pursuit and insisting on the impact it could have on the life of a reader if only made relevant to his or her experience. Examining the sources of this belief, Ian Copestake breaks new ground by tracing the enduring impact of Williams's youthful experience of Unitarianism on his poetry and arguing that Williams is a poet in an Emersonian tradition. Two chapters focus on Williams's long poem Paterson, arguing that its long gestation -- from 1927 to 1951 -- reflects its role asan ethical autobiography in progress. Copestake investigates sources that point to the ethical heart of Williams's poetry and to his lifelong belief that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Ian D. Copestake is a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg, Germany and editor of the William Carlos Williams Review.Trade ReviewMixing biography (with a light dose of psychology), historical contextualisation and careful, evocative close readings, Copestake traces the lineages of Williams's iconoclasm, his empathic imagination and his belief in the affordances of poetry. . . . [T]he utility of poetry is a central ethical concern for Copestake; indeed, he bookends his study with versions of the question, can poetry matter? and looks to Williams to help us answer, yes. * ENGLISH STUDIES *What emerges from Copestake's treatment of Williams is a man of honest and dedicated ambition, a poet continually struggling to find an appropriate form and structure for his poetic voice. . . Over five thematized chapters, moving between intellectual context and textual analysis, the manifold complexities of Williams's intellectual and poetic legacy are given due attentiveness and care. This careful handling of the central subject, together with the directness of Copestake's approach . . . offers a refreshing contribution to Williams studies, and to the broader scholarship of poetic modernism. * JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *Copestake's monograph on William Carlos Williams's poetry offers a well-informed and well-documented insight into the connection between Williams's writing with Unitarianism and Emersonian thinking. . . At the end of this study, one comes to appreciate the sense of commitment and creativity that characterizes Williams's work, making him both a man and a poet of his time. . . This is a study that will appeal to scholars, students and the general public. * EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *[A] well-informed and accessibly written study [that] adds an important and generally neglected facet to Williams's reception by drawing attention to the impact of the poet's Unitarian background on his writing. . . . Readers will always have sensed a notion of moral commitment underlying Williams's work. It is Copestake's merit to have traced some of the substantial roots of this commitment. * ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK *

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Book SynopsisInvestigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion in politics, philosophy, and culture. The eighteenth century is usually considered to be a time of increasing secularization in which the primacy of theology was replaced by the authority of reason, yet this lofty intellectual endeavor played itself out in a social and political reality that was heavily impacted by religious customs and institutions. This duality is visible in the literature and culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. On the one hand, authors such asGoethe, Schiller, and Kleist are known for their distance from traditional Christianity. On the other hand, many canonical texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- from Goethe's Faust to Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas -- are not only filled with references to the Bible, but invoke religious frameworks. Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe investigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion and religious difference in politics, philosophy, and culture, enriching our understanding of the relationship between religion and culture during this foundational period in German history. Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Claire Baldwin, Lisa Beesley, Jane K. Brown, Jeffrey L. High, Elisabeth Krimmer, Helmut J. Schneider, Patricia Anne Simpson, John H. Smith, Tom Spencer. Elisabeth Krimmer is professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Patricia Anne Simpson is professor of German at Montana State University.Trade Review[P]rovides a new and refreshing perspective on the relation between religion and reason as it evolved during the German Enlightenment. . . . [C]overs a vast amount of ground and incorporates many essays that are relevant beyond Enlightenment studies alone . . . . Taken as a whole, it presents many literary and philosophical perspectives that promote new understandings of eighteenth century concepts . . . . * FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES *Comprising ten well-edited, well-annotated contributions from prominent scholars, this collection breaks new ground as it elucidates the complex questions surrounding philosophy, religion, and society. . . . This book is an invaluable contribution to German studies. . . . Essential. CHOICE This is a timely, interesting and very varied collection of essays, well edited and with an engaging introductory essay by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson. . . . [It] is original in examining 'the duality of intellectual freedom and religious habituation' in . . . the culture of the Goethezeit, and in focusing in depth on an eclectic range of literary as well as philosophical texts. . . . Especially interesting are several attempts to relate a feminist perspective to the critique of theology and philosophy in some key texts of German classical drama and prose and (sometimes linked to that perspective) to explore the cultural significance of conversion to Catholicism and the use of its symbolic discourse in several important texts of the time. * ARBITRIUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction "Über Glaubenssachen filosofieren": Wieland on Reason and Religion Personal Impersonalism in Herder's Conception of the Afterlife Clever Priests and the Missions of Moses and Schiller: From Monotheism to the Aesthetic Civilization of the Individual "Then Say What Your Religion Is": Goethe, Religion, and Faust Classicism and Secular Humanism: The Sanctification of Die Zauberflöte in Goethe's "Novelle" Saint Mary's Two Bodies: Religion and Enlightenment in Kleist Catholic Conversion and the End of Enlightenment in Religious and Literary Discourses Sacred Maternity and Secular Sons: Hölderlin's Madonna as Muse Leibniz Reception around 1800: Monadic Vitalism and Aesthetic Harmony "The Magic Formula We All Seek": Spinoza + Fichte = x Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in German. The Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most important postwar writers in German. Her work is enmeshed with the intellectual and cultural developments of the period: she was influenced by European modernism in the early 1950s, experienced the sweeping changes of the 60s, and worked until her death in 1973 on her celebrated and sprawling "Todesarten" (Ways of Death) project, on the decades following National Socialism. Her poetry and prose confront what she called "the sickness of our time": the subtle connection between patriarchal society, catastrophic history in the form of National Socialism, and the subjugation of the Other. Even during her lifetime, Bachmann achieved a prominent position in postwar German-language literature. Interest in her literary output increased sharply in the early 1980s with the publication of the first edition of her works, and has been growing steadily ever since. Bachmann's impact on German literature is comparable to that of Virginia Woolf on English literature. Just as an appreciation of Woolf's poetic oeuvre, and that of other women writers, is impossible without reference to "A Room of One's Own," the critical writings of Bachmann enhance our awareness of not only her own works, but also those of many other writers, philosophers, and artists. As the only translation of Bachmann's essays, lectures, speeches, and theoretical texts into English, The Critical Writings will be a valuable tool for students of Comparative Literature and German literature and cultural studies.Trade ReviewThough best known today for her poems and novels, Bachmann was a serious student of philosophy, an incisive essayist, and an influential commentator on Europe's postwar intellectual and artistic scene. [This] new volume of her critical writings . . . makes this other dimension of her work available to readers in English for the first time. . . . [T]hough Bachmann felt language to be an obstacle to the full expression of being, only when immersed in it does she feel herself. Achberger and Solibakke help us to see behind this self-imposed curtain. . . . The Critical Writings remind us that Bachmann's utopian pursuit, though cut short, aimed for so much more - and that amid the collapse of proofs in our own day, the salvo of the future remains ours to write. -- Peter Filkins * The Boston Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Translation Introduction 1: Autobiographical Writings and Intimate Reflections Biographical Note Group 47 Attempt at an Autobiography On Giuseppe Ungaretti Admittedly Witold Gombrowicz 2: Philosophy Commentary The Vienna Circle: Logical Positivism-Philosophy as Science Ludwig Wittgenstein-A Chapter of the Most Recent History of Philosophy Logic as Mysticism The Sayable and the Unsayable 3: Modern Literature Commentary Franz Kafka: Amerika Into the Millennium The Man Without Qualities The World of Marcel Proust: Views of a Pandemonium Playing Watten and Other Writings (On Thomas Bernhard) An Attempt Bertolt Brecht: Preface to an Anthology of His Poetry The Bell Jar / The Quintessential Horror (On Sylvia Plath) 4: Visual Rhetoric and Poetics Commentary What I Saw and Heard in Rome The Love of God and Affliction: The Path of Simone Weil On the Trail of Language To What End Poems? On the Genesis of the Title "In Apulia" The Poem Addressing the Reader 5: Music Commentary Wondrous Music Music and Poetry Genesis of a Libretto Otello Hommage à Maria Callas Notes on the Libretto 6: The Frankfurt Lectures and Other Speeches Commentary Truth is Within Human Reach (Acceptance Speech for the Radio Play Prize of the German Union of the War Blind) The First Frankfurt Lecture: Problems of Contemporary LiteratureI. Questions and Pseudo-Questions The Second Frankfurt Lecture: On Poems The Third Frankfurt Lecture: Concerning the I The Fourth Frankfurt Lecture: Names The Fifth Frankfurt Lecture: Literature as Utopia On Receiving the Anton Wildgans Prize Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow. Although issues of futurity have become more and more central to literary and cultural studies in recent years, especially in environmental criticism, no scholarly work has yet addressed the topic of beginnings in American poetryin sufficient scope or detail or with adequate theoretical background. This book is a study of how beginnings are made in American poetry, and to what ends. It borrows Walt Whitman's term "future-founding" to establish a theory ofpoetic beginnings that asks how poetry relates to notions of the future and how it imagines, constructs, and influences this future in the present. Furthermore, it seeks to change the way literary scholars think about futurity with regard to American poetry: they most often conceive of it in terms of newness alone, yet a deeper theorization of beginnings must open up new ways of understanding the complexities of this relation. With chapters on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and future-founding poetry after 9/11, this book explains how American poetry makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affected now. Sascha Pöhlmann is Associate Professor of American Literary History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.Trade ReviewEmploying philosophical theory and deft, detailed analysis, Pöhlmann explores 'future-founding poetry,' an aesthetic and political mode of 'making and marking beginnings' ... of cultivating the future in the present; of negotiating the extremes of uncertainty and determinacy; of connecting beginnings to an 'imagination of place. * CHOICE *Sascha Pöhlmann's thrilling and ambitious study is a condensation of many strands . . . [of] Whitmanian American thought into the term of 'future-founding'. . . . Pöhlmann's study is an exhilarating return to the living presence of the Whitmanian spirit that keeps nourishing the American poetic culture. It is also a very interesting [attempt at] capturing the perennial future orientation of this culture. * POLISH JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *Future Founding Poetry is a meticulously written study whose carefully constructed theoretical framework highlights the aesthetic strategies of poetic temporality and poetry's inherent political character. The detailed close readings of the poems provide novel perspectives on the individual authors' works as well as on the temporal dimensions of the genre of poetry as a whole. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *Table of ContentsIntroduction: On How to Begin, and Where Whitman: Beginning American Poetry Williams: Beginning Again Hughes: Urgent Beginnings Rukeyser: Communal Beginnings Ginsberg: Defiant Beginnings Future-Founding Poetry after 9/11 Conclusion: On Where to End Works Cited Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA new evaluation of one of the most significant Holocaust poets, Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), offering the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed pre-war poetry and prose. Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) has long been regarded as one of the most significant Holocaust poets. Her conception of language and words as a landscape has been understood by scholars and critics as an exilic ersatz Heimat for the lost German homeland of a displaced poet. This reading, however, is based entirely on her postwar poems. Such an isolated approach to her complex body of work is increasingly historically problematic; it is also at odds with Sachs's generally cyclical poetic process. In "The Space of Words," Jennifer Hoyer offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose, as well as the first analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel Prize-winning postwar poetry. Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, Hoyer reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return. This diasporic poetics promotes the intellectual and linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essentialsignificance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations. Jennifer M. Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at theUniversity of Arkansas.Trade ReviewJennifer M. Hoyer's book takes a long-needed fresh look at [Sachs's] works and public persona . . . . [It] draw[s] on fascinating Jewish discourses of space and language. It places Sachs provocatively in proximity to 'countermonument artists' such as Art Spiegelman and far from the image of a non-intellectual writer of memorializing monuments. . . . One of the merits and innovations of Hoyer's study is the analysis of two whole cycles of poems, 'Flügel der Prophetie' . . . and 'Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft' . . . . Few previous critics have seen the desirability of a cyclical reading of Sachs's poems; even fewer have attempted such a reading. There is much to be learnt from Hoyer's cyclical readings . . . . [I]nteresting, innovative, and noteworthy . . . . [W]ill provoke discussion and debate for scholars of Jewish Studies and of German Literature . . . . * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Hard, wearying, detailed academic toil has clearly gone into producing this book... The result is more than admirable, and fascinating. There is too little space to even begin with the details, but through them the richness of Sachs' work is clear. * MANCHESTER REVIEW OF BOOKS *Table of Contents"An Stelle von Heimat": An Introduction Biography of the Poet:: "a frail woman must do it" Wandering and Words, Wandering in Words Sach's Merlin the Sorcerer: Reconfiguring the Myth as Plural Poetic Space after the Abyss Israel Is Not Only Land: Diasporic Poetry Relearning to Listen: Sachs's Poem Cycle "Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft" Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisImagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don't have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's ""Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections"" collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced - directly or indirectly - by the women who preceded them.The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry.It includes: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker; Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel; Miranda Field on Fanny Howe; Katie Ford on Jorie Graham; Joy Katz on Sharon Olds; Valerie Martinez on Joy Harjo; Erika Meitner on Rita Dove; Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye; Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley; Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido; Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton; and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock.

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Book SynopsisIn this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. ""History Matters"" does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature. Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history's margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets - including John Ashbery, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Louise Gluck, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O'Hara, and C. K. Williams - as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet's capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.

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Book SynopsisWere the urbane, avant-garde poets of the New York School secretly nature lovers like Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard? In `Urban Pastoral’, Timothy Gray urges us to reconsider our long-held appraisals of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and their peers as celebrants of cosmopolitan culture and to think of their more pastoral impulses. As Gray argues, flowers are more beautiful in the New York School’s garden of verse because no one expects them to bloom there. Along with the poets whose careers he chronicles, Gray shows us that startlingly new approaches to New York City art and literature emerge when natural and artificial elements collide kaleidoscopically, as when O’Hara likens blinking stars to a hairnet, when painter Jane Freilicher places a jar of irises in her studio window to mirror purple plumes rising from Consolidated Edison smokestacks, or when poet Kathleen Norris equates rooftop water towers with grain silos as she plans her escape route to the Great Plains. The New York School poets and their coterie have become a staple of poetics, literary criticism and biography, cultural studies, and art criticism, but `Urban Pastoral’ is the first study to offer sustained discussion of the pastoral and natural imagery within the work of these renowned “city poets” and also to consider poets from the second generation of the New York School—Diane di Prima, Jim Carroll, and Kathleen Norris. Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of literary criticism to embrace the creative spirit of New York poets and artists, Gray’s accessible, lively, and blithely experimental book will shape future discussions of contemporary urban literature and literary nature writing, offering new evidence of avant-garde poetry’s role within those realms.

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Book SynopsisThe Fall and Other PoemsTable of ContentsBaptism -- Restoration -- Timor mortis -- The libertine against abortion -- The spring advances -- The fall -- The Boston school of beauty -- The attic -- Dirge -- Lines written on my daughter Faith's second birthday -- What water washes wears away -- Diaspora -- Black scrawl -- Song -- Tetrameter -- Fiat rex -- The profligate poet calls for Bishop Golias -- The Winter orchard -- The November funeral of a twelve-year-old girl -- Henry Carter in his bath -- Larvatus prodeo -- Twelve quatrains -- Modern Catholic verse -- On publishing his memoirs -- The kiln -- The feet like water -- On an ancient Roman frieze -- Washington, the first of May -- Hades' lament at Persephone's annual departure -- Hymeneal -- St. Columbkille's -- Love in Boston -- In refusal of politics -- About the author.

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Book SynopsisPoetry is exciting, but elusive to most. This is troublesome for Christians because the Bible, John Poch reminds us, is largely composed of poetical verse. In God’s Poems, Poch re-introduces sacred text as purposefully poetic, and explains what that means and invites the reader to with this insight live more thoughtfully and beautifully. But that is not all. Poch as a well-established and regarded poet, turns his eye to contemporary poetry and vindicates its function in a “created and creative world.” Today many have abandoned the genre as a wasteland of misguided voice that really has nothing to say. The poet is a truth-teller, and Poch as devoted writer, teacher, and believer sends out a renewed call to turn to verse as a means of seeing oneself as God’s poeima, or poem (Letter to Ephesians). The depth of self-knowing relates directly to an aptitude to engage the category of poetry at some level. A tragic void is filled with Poch’s effort to exhort the reader to patiently reconnect with poetry even though it has been hijacked by persons who want to be heard more than speak well. (This book is essential, therefore, for aspiring poets.) For faithful readers or those seeking to return, Poch is a place to begin to understand contemporary writers worth knowing and which poets of the past must remain with us. In Virgilian fashion, he can see the panorama behind him and that which lies immediately ahead and instills a recovered love of an eternal medium that will be restored to a state of coherency and enlightened perspective. If Poch has faith in poetry it is because poetry is indeed a source of faith. If Justin Martyr claimed that everything that is true belongs to Christians, Poch shows us that everyone who speaks truth is to some degree a poet. Even God with his revealed wisdom chooses poetry as medium par excellence. It is essential to know how poetry works. “Great poems that we consider literature give us what we never expected. They go beyond the usefulness of conveying a feeling and unveiling beauty; and they tell us who we are.”

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Book SynopsisPoets examined include Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth and Yeats. New to this edition are Leonard Cohen, Christopher Logue and Harold Pinter.

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Book SynopsisDante's Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions - historical, literary, religious, and ethical - that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult.Part 1, "Materials," gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a freshman seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.Trade ReviewThe authors in this volume expertly address both traditional and new trends in Dante scholarship, covering the field and breaking new ground. The editors do a superb job of bringing these themes together and providing a context for them." - Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College

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Book SynopsisEssays on teaching love, ethics, and medieval allegory.One of the most influential texts of its time, the Romance of the Rose offers readers a window into the world view of the late Middle Ages in Europe, including notions of moral philosophy and courtly love. Yet the Rose also explores topics that remain relevant to readers today, such as gender, desire, and the power of speech. Students, however, can find the work challenging because of its dual authorship by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, its structure as an allegorical dream vision, and its encyclopedic length and scope. The essays in this volume offer strategies for teaching the poem with confidence and enjoyment. Part 1, "Materials," suggests helpful background resources. Part 2, "Approaches," presents contexts, critical approaches, and strategies for teaching the work and its classical and medieval sources, illustrations, and adaptations as well as the intellectual debates that surrounded it.

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Book SynopsisEssays for teaching ancient and recent epic narratives from around the world.Cultures across the globe have embraced epics: stories of memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for their lives and their communities. Incorporating narrative elements also found in sacred history, chronicle, saga, legend, romance, myth, folklore, and the novel, epics throughout history have both animated the imagination and encouraged reflection on what it means to be human. Teaching World Epics addresses ancient and more recent epic works from Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and East, Central, and South Asia that are available in English translations.Useful to instructors of literature, peace and conflict studies, transnational studies, women's studies, and religious studies, the essays in this volume focus on epics in sociopolitical and cultural contexts, on the adaptation and reception of epic works, and on themes that are especially relevant today, such as gender dynamics and politics, national identity, colonialism and imperialism, violence, and war.This volume includes discussion of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giulia Bigolina's Urania, The Book of Dede Korkut, Luis Vaz de Camões's Os Lusiadas, David of Sassoun, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the epic of Sun-Jata, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga's La Araucana, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Kalevala, Kebra Nagast, Kudrun, The Legend of Poṉṉivaḷa Nadu, the Mahabharata, Manas, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Mwindo, the Nibelungenlied, Poema de mio Cid, Popol Wuj, the Ramayana, the Shahnameh, Sirat Bani Hilal, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Statius's Thebaid, The Tale of the Heike, Three Kingdoms, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México, and Virgil's Aeneid.

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Book SynopsisEssays for teaching ancient and recent epic narratives from around the world.Cultures across the globe have embraced epics: stories of memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for their lives and their communities. Incorporating narrative elements also found in sacred history, chronicle, saga, legend, romance, myth, folklore, and the novel, epics throughout history have both animated the imagination and encouraged reflection on what it means to be human. Teaching World Epics addresses ancient and more recent epic works from Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and East, Central, and South Asia that are available in English translations.Useful to instructors of literature, peace and conflict studies, transnational studies, women's studies, and religious studies, the essays in this volume focus on epics in sociopolitical and cultural contexts, on the adaptation and reception of epic works, and on themes that are especially relevant today, such as gender dynamics and politics, national identity, colonialism and imperialism, violence, and war.This volume includes discussion of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giulia Bigolina's Urania, The Book of Dede Korkut, Luis Vaz de Camões's Os Lusiadas, David of Sassoun, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the epic of Sun-Jata, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga's La Araucana, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Kalevala, Kebra Nagast, Kudrun, The Legend of Poṉṉivaḷa Nadu, the Mahabharata, Manas, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Mwindo, the Nibelungenlied, Poema de mio Cid, Popol Wuj, the Ramayana, the Shahnameh, Sirat Bani Hilal, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Statius's Thebaid, The Tale of the Heike, Three Kingdoms, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México, and Virgil's Aeneid.

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Book SynopsisThe poetry of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw has fascinated critics for centuries. Ambivalently received but inescapably influential, their tradition can be traced through some of the best poets of our time. This new volume from the ""Bloom's Classic Critical Views"" series features insightful essays from the 17th and early 20th centuries that offer students of literature historical insights into these significant poets.

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Book SynopsisFrom the modernist explorations of the first half of the 20th century to the diverse styles and practitioners of the 21st century, contemporary American poetry has forged a vital and enduring tradition. This volume explores the genre's recent history and development, as succeeding generations of poets have taken up the American idiom and molded it into their own unique modes of expression. This new edition explores contemporary poetry through a selection of critical essays and also features an introductory essay by esteemed professor Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisFrom earliest childhood the nursery rhyme, one of the most captivating genres in our popular culture, has transmitted powerful messages to the child who hears it. These meanings may not be the ones adults perceive or intend, for such didactic precepts as the beneficial need of self-control, social order, and academic responsibility also can be weighted with the sadistic, angry connotations that lie deep in the human spirit. In Cradle and All nursery rhymes are shown to be both the instruments that tell children of the mortal hunger for the forces in the natural world that oppose them. Thus in bearing a double load of meanings, nursery rhymes remove the blinders and push children toward the life of contrasts that abound in their culture. This fascinating examination of the pervasive influence of nursery rhymes reveals patterns of psychological and cultural meaning in a broad range of rhymes, grouping them according to basic subject matter: animal rhymes, courtship and marriage rhymes, lullabies and amusements, and didactic rhymes. Combining the tools of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, folklore studies, cultural history, and cultural anthropology, Cradle and All explores meanings and motives that lie deep in many rhymes that are the fundamental literature of the nursery. This illuminating study also assesses attempts to sanitize rhymes by removing elements that some deem as needlessly violent, antisocial, and sexist. Cradle and Allis unique in its analytical treatment of a large number of rhymes grouped in broad subject areas. In its diverse and comprehensive approach it will appeal to all who enjoy the lore of childhood literature.

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Book SynopsisBeginning with a deceptively simple question—What do we mean when we designate behaviours, values, or forms of expression as “black”?—Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalised young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century.Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists’ and activists’ insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets—in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander—generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts.Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalised, or misread because its experiments were not “recognisably black”—or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they were.

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Book SynopsisThe damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? To answer these questions, poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetics that undermine poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer?This innovative volume speaks to all people wanting to understand how artistic and critical endeavours can enrich, rather than impoverish, the imperilled world around us.

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers and theorists have long recognised both the subversive and the transformative possibilities of friendship, the intimacy of which can transcend the impersonality of such identity categories as race, class, or gender. Unlike familial relations, friendships are chosen, opening a space of relative freedom in which to create and explore new identities. This process has been particularly valuable to poets marginalised by gender or sexuality since the second half of the twentieth century, as friendship provides both a buffer against and a wedge into predominantly male homosocial poetic communities.Among Friendspresents a richly theorised evocation of friendship as a fluid, critical social space, one that offers a vantage point from which to explore the gendering of poetic institutions and practices from the postwar period to the present. With friendship as an optic, the essays in this volume offer important new insights into the gender politics of the poetic avant-garde, since poetry as an institution has continued to be transformed by dramatic changes wrought by second-wave feminism, sexual liberation, and gay rights. These essays reveal the intimate social negotiations that fight, fracture, and queer the conventions of authority and community that have long constrained women poets and the gendering of poetic subjectivities.From this shared perspective, the essays collected here investigate a historically and aesthetically wide-ranging array of subjects: from Joanne Kyger and Philip Whalen’s trans-Pacific friendship, to Patti Smith’s grounding of her punk persona in the tension between her romantic friendships with male artists and her more professional connections to the poets of the St. Mark’s scene, and from the gender dynamics of the Language School to the Flarf network’s reconception of poetic community in the digital age and the Black Took Collective’s creation of an intimate poetics of performance. Together, these explorations of poetic friendship open up new avenues for interrogating contemporary American poetry. Contributors: Maria Damon, Andrew Epstein, Ross Hair, Duriel E. Harris, Daniel Kane, Dawn Lundy Martin, Peter Middleton, Linda Russo, Lytle Shaw, Ann Vickery, Barrett Watten, Ronaldo V. Wilson

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Book SynopsisBodies on the Line offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key post-war American poets to explore the social and literary context of the sixties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting differing styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain. The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imitators, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional communion, and affect. The skeptical strain emphasizes openness of interpretation and multivalent meaning, a lack of stability or consistency, and ironic detachment.By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centred on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to “hear” as well as “read” poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers the most comprehensive and detailed reading to date of Song of Myself. One of the most distinguished critics in Whitman studies, Ed Folsom, and one of the nation’s most prominent writers and literary figures, Christopher Merrill, carry on a dialog with Whitman, and with each other, section by section, as they invite readers to enter into the conversation about how the poem develops, moves, improvises, and surprises. Instead of picking and choosing particular passages to support a reading of the poem, Folsom and Merrill take Whitman at his word and interact with “every atom” of his work. The book presents Whitman’s final version of the poem, arranged in fifty-two sections; each section is followed by Folsom’s detailed critical examination of the passage, and then Merrill offers a poet’s perspective, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about both the passage in question and the entire poem.

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Book SynopsisThe Afterlives of Specimens explores the space between science and sentiment, the historical moment when the human cadaver became both lost love object and subject of anatomical violence. Walt Whitman witnessed rapid changes in relations between the living and the dead. In the space of a few decades, dissection evolved from a posthumous punishment inflicted on criminals to an element of preservationist technology worthy of the presidential corpse of Abraham Lincoln. Whitman transitioned from a fervent opponent of medical bodysnatching to a literary celebrity who left behind instructions for his own autopsy, including the removal of his brain for scientific study.Grounded in archival discoveries, Afterlives traces the origins of nineteenth-century America’s preservation compulsion, illuminating the influences of botanical, medical, spiritualist, and sentimental discourses on Whitman’s work. Tuggle unveils previously unrecognized connections between Whitman and the leading “medical men” of his era, such as the surgeon John H. Brinton, founding curator of the Army Medical Museum, and Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. Remains from several amputee soldiers whom Whitman nursed in the Washington hospitals became specimens in the Army Medical Museum.Tuggle is the first scholar to analyze Whitman’s role in medically memorializing the human cadaver and its abandoned parts.Trade Review"In a deft study that weaves together the story of Whitman’s aesthetic development and the history of medical practice, Tuggle casts new light on this pivotal moment in Whitman’s artistic career and this equally pivotal moment in US history. [...] Tuggle is at her best when she recovers the fascinating history of nineteenth-century scientific and medical history and links this history with Whitman’s own writing. [...] This lively, fascinating work mines the rich history of medical science in the nineteenth century and draws illuminating connections to one of the most vital figures of American letters." - ALH Online Review, Series XVI

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Book SynopsisEcopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others. Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists’ collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability. This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as “coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics,” rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today.

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