Search results for ""author words"

Thomas Hardy notes the thrush’s ‘full-hearted evensong of joy illimited’, Gilbert White observes how swallows sweep through the air but swifts ‘dash round in circles’ and Rachel Carson watches sanderlings at the ocean’s edge, scurrying ‘across the beach like little ghosts’. From early times, we have been entranced by the bird life around us. This anthology brings together poetry and prose in celebration of birds, records their behaviour, flight, song and migration, the changes across the seasons and in different habitats – in woodland and pasture, on river, shoreline and at sea – and our own interaction with them. From India to America, from China to Rwanda, writers marvel at birds – the building of a long-tailed tit’s nest, the soaring eagle, the extraordinary feats of migration and the pleasures to be found in our own gardens. Including extracts by Geoffrey Chaucer, Dorothy Wordsworth, Richard Jefferies, Charles Darwin, James Joyce, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, Kathleen Jamie, Jonathan Franzen and Barbara Kingsolver among many others, this rich anthology will be welcomed by bird-lovers, country ramblers and anyone who has taken comfort or joy in a bird in flight.

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This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

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One of our most incisive critics asks where the assault against the canons of Western culture has led us. Engaging a wide range of literature and criticism, Hartman considers the term "culture" and its many uses, and calls for the restoration of literature to its place as the focus of thinking about culture and for the renewal of aesthetic education to help ensure the balance between art, culture, and politics. Lost among the shouts and skirmishes of the "culture wars" is the very idea of culture itself. In this illuminating book, one of our most distinguished critics and scholars asks what the assault against the canons of Western culture has left in its place. If art and literature are largely the products of ideology and interest, how do they matter? And what does the idea of culture mean in today's sprawling, fragmented, critical world where everything -poetry or pornography- gets "read" in the same way? Engaging an extraordinary range of literature, philosophy, social criticism, and popular culture, Geoffrey Hartman probes the meanings and uses of culture in contemporary society. The triumph of cultural studies -and its critiques of bourgeois Eurocentric tradition- is largely complete, Hartman writes. Against the political appropriation of culture, he posits, instead, a definition of culture as public conversation, intellectual and social debate among diverse communities. And against reactionary pressures to impose -or reinstate- a singular culture, or to seek in art or literature an affirmation of group identity, Hartman sketches new roles for human imagination in a postmodern world. For Hartman, the fusion of culture and politics, of whatever ideology, is disastrous. At a time of abstraction, fragmentation, and alienation, art and literature offer wholeness and meaning. But the promise is frought with danger, Hartman argues, in a provocative discussion of the uses of culture as exemplified in the Romantic legacy. He pays special attention to literature's role in reconnecting us to the world. The choice is ours: Wordsworth or Heidegger, literature as shared experience or as reactionary ideology. Hartman ranges widely in these elegant pages. He confronts the shock to the universalistic sense of culture from the Holocaust, as well as the problematic responses of such critic as Adorno and Derrida; explores the poetry of Wordsworth both as a diagnostic and a counter-model to the desensitization of modern life; and addresses the impact of politics of inclusion and diversity on the claims of high culture. Perhaps Hartman's most publicly engaged book, The Fateful Question of Culture embraces both the masterworks of European literature and art and the signs and symbols of popular media and daily life. It is a powerful reaffirmation of the liberating discourses that have always been at the very center of the Western tradition.

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From its origins in the 13th century the University of Cambridge has attracted many notable students and teachers, both brilliant and eccentric. From Erasmus to Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, the university has been at the forefront of philosophical inquiry. Actors and directors like Sir Ian Mckellen and Sir Peter Hall have earned Cambridge a reputation for theatrical excellence, while the colleges have been home to an extraordinary list of poets, including Milton and Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. During the 20th century the city surrounding the university grew rapidly as a once small fenland town became a magnet for high-tech industries. But there are still quiet courts and green spaces - Parker's Piece, Midsummer Common, Jesus Green, and the Backs. The University City: courts and gardens, dons and students; Cambridge poets and spies; the struggle for women's colleges and degrees The City of Science and Discovery: Newton, Darwin, the Cambridge physicists, the double helix, Stephen hawking and the secrets of the universe The City of Drama and Comedy: from latin entertainments for Elizabeth I to the Footlights and Monty Python

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A landmark reissue of a great teacher's finest work.Lionel Trilling was, during his lifetime, generally acknowledged to be one of the finest essayists in the English language, the heir of Hazlitt and the peer of Orwell. Since his death in 1974, his work has been discussed and hotly debated, yet today, when writers and critics claim to be "for" or "against" his interpretations, they can hardly be well acquainted with them, for his work has been largely out of print for years.With this re-publication of Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many new generations a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces--on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination.This exhilarating work has much to teach readers who may have been encouraged to adopt simpler systems of meaning, or were taught to exchange the ideals of reason and individuality for those of enthusiasm and the false romance of group identity. Trilling's remarkable essays show a critic who was philosophically motivated and textually responsible, alive to history but not in thrall to it, exercised by art but not worshipful of it, consecrated to ideas but suspicious of theory.

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Springtide A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring's introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells in scarlet. The flowers are flares of white. The chaffinch has gone quiet and turned sky-gazer. My eyes close on the day: an orb revolves in grey and red and azure. Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern Europe who won acclaim for their political poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, Reynek belongs to an older pastoral-devotional tradition a kindred spirit to the likes of English-language poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas. The first book of Reynek's poetry to be published in English, The Well at Morning presents a selection of poems from across his life and is illustrated with twenty-five of his own color etchings. Also featuring three essays by leading scholars that place Reynek's life and work alongside those of his better-known peers, this book presents a noted Czech artist to the wider world, reshaping and amplifying our understanding of modern European poetry.

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Winner of the 2006 Truman Capote Prize for Literary Achievement Geoffrey Hartman's interests range over almost the entire field of contemporary literature and culture. In this, the first Reader of his work, significant essays reflect his abiding interest in English and American poetry, focusing not only on Romanticism but also on the transition from early modern to modern and including reflections on the radical elements in artistic representation. Hartman, whose book on Wordsworth changed our understanding of that poet, brings theory and close reading together. A major consideration of Freud is accompanied by intensive analyses of Lacan and Derrida, and a psychoesthetic theory of literary genesis is proposed. Popular literature is examined through the American detective novel; Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Bernard Malamud are brought together in an examination of realism; the premodern mode of midrashic interpretation is reintroduced to literary study; and major trends in criticism, including trauma studies, receive attention. Hartman's assessment of the media revolution and cultural studies is represented by shorter pieces of film criticism as well as his classic essays on 'Public Memory and its Discontents' and 'Tele-Suffering and Testimony' - the latter also describes a pioneering effort to collect on video the experiences of Holocaust survivors. This anthology is both highly readable and, because of its range and intellectual vigour, essential for all those concerned with the fate of the humanities and the future of literary criticism. Features *Leading US critic of contemporary literature and culture, particularly in the areas of poetry, Romanticism, trauma studies, public culture, pedagogy, and literary theory and criticism *Selection ranges across Geoffrey Hartman's illustrious career with the readings organised into six thematic parts *Publication coincides with the 50th anniversary of Geoffrey Hartman's first published book

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U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: 'Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. No room for Cupid.""(...) The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In "Christmas Poems", UA felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky's the limit.'

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Certain moments in British Romantic poetry and art depict a state from which the attributes of existence time and space, subject and object, language and visuality have fallen away, leaving a domain prior to the world and to thought, the condition of mere existence. As Blank Splendour demonstrates, poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Clare as well as paintings by Turner evoke a condition that transpires in a time without time, a life without life.David Collings argues that these works invite us to move beyond the subtle remnants of ontology that linger in current versions of posthuman thought, such as affect theory and speculative realism, by opening up a domain of affect without affect, a world without objects. Anticipating the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, these works bring into view the mode of a deconstruction that emerged before the linguistic turn, one that meditates on the blank condition underlying modernity. Ultimately, Bla

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William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English essayists, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays that spark with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from his world come alive: Wordsworth and Beau Brummell, street jugglers and coffee house politicians, the ladies' maid returning from Italy 'as giddy as if she had been up in a balloon' and the literary footmen who 'wear green spectacles' and 'are seen reading books they do not understand at the Museum and public libraries'.Gregory Dart's selection reminds us that Hazlitt is not only an important critic and polemicist, but also a reflective, wry, wise and humorous writer, a man who relished London life. Many of the essays included here are made available for the first time in paperback. A detailed introduction and notes set them in their context and clarify contemporary references.

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How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

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For the poet, even the most minute details of the natural world are starting points for flights of the imagination, and the pages of this collection celebrating the four seasons are brimming with an extraordinary range of observation and imagery.  Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau, from Keats, Blake, and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost’s tribute to the evanescence of spring in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to Langston Hughes’s moody “Summer Night” in Harlem, from the “stopped woods” in Marie Ponsot’s “End of October” to the chilling “mind of winter” in Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” the poems in this

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Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered—in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period’s poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms. The ten essays in Meter Matters showcase the range of metrical practice of poets from Wordsworth and Byron to Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson; at the same time, the contributors bring into focus some of the metrical theorizing that shaped poetic thinking and responses to it throughout the nineteenth century. Paying close attention to the historical contours of Romantic and Victorian meters, as well as to the minute workings of the verse line, Meter Matters presents a fresh perspective on a subject that figured significantly in the century’s literature, and in its culture.

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The six great Romantic poets represented in this concise collection – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – are those considered essential reading for anyone with an interest in the verse of the period. An essential selection of poetry by the six great Romantic poets. Ideal for general readers or for students taking short courses in Romanticism. Includes the whole of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Gives readers a concise overview of Romantic poetry.

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An analysis of literary criticism that explores the origins of modern criticism in Romanticism and discusses work by Wordsworth, Derrida, Foucault and de Man. The book argues that there is a complex interplay between concepts of subjectivity and linguistic choices.

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At the height of the middle ages, there were hundreds of abbeys and priories throughout England. The ruins of some of those that were destroyed at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries are today seen as iconic medieval buildings - such as Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, designated a World Heritage site, or Tintern Abbey on the river Wye, immortalised by Wordsworth. These monasteries - particularly those of the Benedictine and Cistercian orders - were not simply powerhouses of prayer, but major local landowners who improved agriculture, replanned villages and founded new towns. For this reason, Glyn Coppack's far-ranging study not only looks at the churches and the immediate monastic buildings, but at the full range of ancillary buildings.

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Find it! In the garden contains 25 things for children to search for whilst out the back of the house, along with amazing facts and mind-bending puzzles. Perfect for minimising screen time, Find it! books keep children entertained, engaged and curious about the world around them. - Search for worms, flower pots and weeds amongst many other things. - Learn fascinating facts about the things you are searching for. - Play wordsearches, mazes, spot the differences, and various other quizzes and games. The back of the book contains a certificate to award when everything has been successfully found, and for every 3 books completed, you can send off for a Find it! Super Spotter badge!

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Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell's travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland's wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.

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In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his pre-war job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Always hard up, he lived in what he called a “lousy council flat” with his wife, Ann, and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the novel that was to become Lord of the Flies, and sent it to five publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth publisher he tried was Faber and Faber, and the professional reader wrote her opinion on the typescript: “Time the Future. Absurd & uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull.”  But the novel was rescued from the reject pile by a new recruit to Faber, and when it was finally published in September 1954 the poet Stevie Smith greeted it as “this beautiful and de

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Alice's second adventure takes her through the looking-glass to a place even curiouser than Wonderland. She finds herself caught up in the great looking-glass chess game and sets off to become a queen. It isn't as easy as she expects: at every step she is hindered by nonsense characters who crop up and insist on reciting poems. Some of these poems, such as 'The Walrus and The Carpenter' and 'Jabberwocky', are as famous as the Alice stories themselves.Macmillan was the original publisher of Alice in 1865 and is proud to remain true to the vision of its creators. Every bit as iconic are Sir John Tenniel's remarkable black line illustrations, perfectly capturing the combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary at the heart of Wonderland.This beautiful, celebratory, edition of Through the Looking-Glass has a gorgeous cover with a shiny silver foiled looking-glass, and is packed full of fun bonus material, including a quiz, wordsearch and a glossary. Lewis Carroll's classic children's book is brought to life like never before!

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'A deeply satirical and thought-provoking thriller' Sunday ExpressA couple of ice cubes, first, then the apple that really started it all. A loft apartment in London's East End; cool but doomed, demolition and redevelopment slated for the following week. Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week wedding lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below. Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are following the fruit towards the pitted tarmac... just as mobiles start to ring, and the apartment's remaining TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center... Praise for Iain Banks:'The most imaginative novelist of his generation' The Times'His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers' Ken MacLeod, Guardian'His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent' Neil Gaiman'An exceptional wordsmith' Scotsman

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Winner of the 2006 Truman Capote Prize for Literary Achievement Geoffrey Hartman's interests range over almost the entire field of contemporary literature and culture. In this, the first Reader of his work, significant essays reflect his abiding interest in English and American poetry, focusing not only on Romanticism but also on the transition from early modern to modern and including reflections on the radical elements in artistic representation. Hartman, whose book on Wordsworth changed our understanding of that poet, brings theory and close reading together. A major consideration of Freud is accompanied by intensive analyses of Lacan and Derrida, and a psychoesthetic theory of literary genesis is proposed. Popular literature is examined through the American detective novel; Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Bernard Malamud are brought together in an examination of realism; the premodern mode of midrashic interpretation is reintroduced to literary study; and major trends in criticism, including trauma studies, receive attention. Hartman's assessment of the media revolution and cultural studies is represented by shorter pieces of film criticism as well as his classic essays on 'Public Memory and its Discontents' and 'Tele-Suffering and Testimony' - the latter also describes a pioneering effort to collect on video the experiences of Holocaust survivors. This anthology is both highly readable and, because of its range and intellectual vigour, essential for all those concerned with the fate of the humanities and the future of literary criticism. Features *Leading US critic of contemporary literature and culture, particularly in the areas of poetry, Romanticism, trauma studies, public culture, pedagogy, and literary theory and criticism *Selection ranges across Geoffrey Hartman's illustrious career with the readings organised into six thematic parts *Publication coincides with the 50th anniversary of Geoffrey Hartman's first published book

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This is a collection of three history plays, each displaying the sparkling muscularity of language that marks Berkoff out as one of the foremost wordsmiths in the English language. Set in thirteenth-century England, Ritual in Blood looks at the persecution of the Jews. Messiah begins with the image of Christ on the cross and pits His humanity and transcendent goodness against the evil of those who would kill Him. Finally, Berkoff offers a sharp and accessible adaptation of Sophocles's Oedipus tragedy.

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Rebecca O'Connor's first collection of poetry We'll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Spectator, Poetry Review and elsewhere. She was a writer in residence at the Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism and is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. She is co-founder and publisher of The Moth magazine. She lives in County Cavan, Ireland. He Is Mine and I Have No Other is her first novel.@RebeccaMoth themothmagazine.com

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London's poetry ranges from the up-beat rap of Benjamin Zephaniah to Wordsworth's dawn sigh over the beauty of Westminster Bridge, from half-charred lines of Anglo-Saxon to yesterday's lyrics retrieved from a pub floor. Like the city itself this collection is full of grief, irony and delight. It shares no unifying historical vision and offers no single perspective over this tidal valley of mud, gravel, power and gold. Instead the unblinking eyes of the poets, touched by God, madness and desire, create a potent and highly personal corrective to political history.

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The Scots have always had a reputation for clarity of thought and also for the vigour with which it is put into words.This collection spans the entire gamut of a nation''s recorded thought and experience from Roman Scotland to the present day. It covers a vast range of subject matter and demonstrates a remarkable variety of moods and tones, from the literary to the colloquial and bawdy. Packed with sharp observation and humour, it sounds other notes too. Meditative, triumphant, tragic, accusing, tender - and often hilarious - it reveals the spirit of Scotland in a truly unique way.

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Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.

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Poems of Rome ranges across the centuries and contains the work of poets from many cultures and times, from ancient Rome to contemporary America. Designed to lend itself to those visiting the city - whether in person or imagination - the book is divided into sections by place. Its pages lead the reader from the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, from the Vatican to the Villa Sciarra, from the Pantheon to the Palatine Hill, all seen through the eyes of poets who have been dazzled by these glorious sites for centuries. The poets range from Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Martial through Du Bellay and Rilke to Pasolini and Pavese, with a strong cast of 19th-century travellers - Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Clough, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Wilde, Longfellow - and a varied selection of modern poets including Elizabeth Jennings, Cecil Day Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Jorie Graham, James Wright and Rosanna Warren. A collection as dazzling as the great city itself.

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A calming collection of nature poems to help you relax and unwind at the end of every day. Now more than ever we’re all in need of a daily fix of the natural world, to comfort and distract us from the cares of everyday life. Keep this beautiful book by your bedside and enjoy a dreamy stroll through nature every evening, just before you go to sleep. All the great, time-honoured poets are here – William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Bridges – along with some newer and less-well known poetic voices. The poems reflect and celebrate the changing seasons: read Emily Brontë on bluebells in spring and Edward Thomas’s evocative ‘Adlestrop’ in summer, then experience golden autumn with Hartley Coleridge and William Blake's 'To Winter'. Beautifully illustrated with scenes from each season, this wonderful book deserves a place on your bedside table for years to come.

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A beautifully illustrated collection of famous poems written about birds to read and cherish as a source of comfort and joy. Poets have long looked to birds for inspiration and this anthology of 65 poems is an ode to the myriad of way that these creatures bring us joy and solace. The poets here represented are amongst the greatest who have ever lived, and their joint celebration of a common theme has resulted in an enchanting book. Amongst the poets whose work is included are Blake, Shakespeare and Wordsworth; Tennyson, Keats and Shelley; twentieth-century writers, amongst them Yeats, Laurie Lee and Ted Hughes; and such American poets as Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke. Each poem is illustrated by iconic artworks by JJ Audubon, creating a beautiful book to cherish for years to come.

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'A stunning book. Banks' powerful imagination is joined to a rare ability to be truly funny while exploring a nightmare world' Sunday TimesA man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream and fantasy, past and future, fuse. Who is this man? Where is he? Is he more dead than alive? Or has he never been so alive before?Praise for Iain Banks:'The most imaginative novelist of his generation' The Times'His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers' Ken MacLeod, Guardian'His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent' Neil Gaiman'An exceptional wordsmith' Scotsman

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One of the highly praised Lakeland poets, alongside his friend William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a founder of the Romantic movement in England. His work - still popular today - includes such classics as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan as well as the beautiful early poem Frost at Midnight: 'Or if the secret ministry of frost, Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.'Despite the great beauty of his work, he suffered from bouts of depression and today it is speculated he may well have had bipolar disorder. For both mental and physical ailments he was treated with laudanum which led to a lifelong addition to opium.Coleridge's influence was widespread - he was a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson - indeed, he invented the phrase suspension of disbelief. This collection is a fascinating insight into his life, as well as his work.

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This illuminating collection of previously unpublished talks traces the development of Sangharakshita's presentation of the Dharma in the West from 1965 to 2011. It includes some of his characteristic teachings in their earliest forms (the levels of Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels, for example), and makes other talks accessible for the first time in published form. We see the unfolding of the Buddhist movement he founded, from Sangharakshita's talks before the movement began, his early teachings that foreshadow aspects of its nature, and then its beginnings in a basement in 1960s London. Other talks cover development of the sangha over the years, and Sangharakshita's reflections on what would help it develop in the years to come. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the Pali canon and The Tibetan Book of the Dead to Beowulf and William Wordsworth, there are many intriguing perspectives: an exploration of Buddhist psychology, the histories of great teachers like Padmasambhava and Atisa, reflections on going forth, creativity, the demons around and within us, the role of the will in the spiritual life, and much more. The final talks in the volume, given towards the end of Sangharakshita's life, are more personal, and they include reflections on dreams, old age and rebirth.

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Legendary wordsmith Raekwon the Chef opens up about his journey from the staircases of Park Hill in Staten Island to sold-out stadiums around the world with the Wu-Tang Clan in this revealing memoir - perfect for fans of The Autobiography of Gucci Mane and Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter. There are rappers that everyone loves, and there are rappers that every rapper loves, and Corey Woods, a.k.a. Raekwon the Chef, is one of the few who is both. His versatile flow, natural storytelling and evocative imagery has inspired legions of fans and a new generation of rappers. As one of the founding members of Wu-Tang Clan, Raekwon’s voice and cadence is synonymous with the inimitable sound that has made the group iconic since 1991. Now, for the first time, Raekwon tells his full story, from struggling through poverty to make ends meet to turning a hobby into a legacy. The Wu-Tang story is dense, complex and full of drama, and here nothing is off limits: the group’s underground origins, secrets behind songs like 'C.R.E.A.M.' and 'Protect Ya Neck', and what it took to be one of the first hip-hop groups to break into the mainstream. Raekwon also dives deep into the making of his meticulous solo albums - particularly the classic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx - and talks about how spirituality and fatherhood continue to inspire his unstoppable creative process.A celebration of perseverance and the power of music, From Staircase to Stage is a master storyteller’s lifelong journey to stay true to himself and his roots.

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This book delineates different manifestations of the vagabond spirit of poetry through the ages. In doing so, it makes claims for the efficacy of poetry in our industrialized world, where we are presented with environmental, political and economic challenges. The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry demonstrates that poems are vital now more than ever because they can transform our relations with each other and with the earth. It acknowledges the awesome power of poems by providing you with fresh ways to apprehend their profound spiritual insights. You will be surprised by how sharp your imagination becomes once you start following the paths opened by Edward Clarke's original readings. This region is full of unexpected turns and pleasant clearings. Beginning in the middle of things with Wordsworth, you will be taken on a journey from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens. Significant older poets, including Homer, Virgil and Dante, will enliven conversations with the wisest British, Irish and American poets of the modern age. As you proceed, poetry will teach you how to put into practice its perennial wisdom.

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The term ‘idiot’ is a damning put down, whether deployed on the playground or in the board room. People stigmatized as being ‘intellectually disabled’ today must confront variants of the fear and pity with which society has greeted them for centuries. In this ground-breaking new study Patrick McDonagh explores how artistic, scientific and sociological interpretations of idiocy work symbolically and ideologically in society. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of British, French and American resources including literary works (Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’, Dickens Barnaby Rudge, Conrad’s The Secret Agent), pedagogical works (Itard’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron, Sequin’s Traitement moral, hygiene et education des idiots, and Howe’s On the courses of Idiocy), medical and scientific papers (Philippe Pinel, Henry Maudsley, William Ireland, John Langdon Downs, Isaac Kerlin, Henry Goddard) and sociological writings (Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Beames’ The Rookeries of London, Dugdal’s The Jukes), Idiocy: A Cultural History offers a rich study of the history and representation of mental disability.

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This book contends that when late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own. It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period’s obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience. The book shows how these epistemological dilemmas became gendered by studying a series of extravagantly affective scenes: Hume’s extraordinary confession of his own melancholy in the Treatise of Human Nature; Charlotte Smith’s insistence that she really feels the gloomy feelings portrayed in her Elegiac Sonnets; Wordsworth’s witnessing of a woman poet reading and weeping; tearful exchanges between fathers and daughters in the gothic novel; the climactic debate over the strengths of men’s and women’s feelings in Jane Austen’s Persuasion; and the poetic and public mourning of a dead princess in 1817.

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This title includes readings that work through tropes disclose the material inscription at the origins of literary texts. Focusing insistently on the practice of rhetorical reading, this book demonstrates how the self-undoing of tropological systems necessarily generates narratives which turn out to be allegories of their own conditions of (im)possibility. The volume also contains two essays on Paul de Man and literary theory, as well as an interview on the topic of 'Deconstruction at Yale'. These latter texts are explicitly about the 'place' of rhetoric and its importance for any critical reading worthy of the name. As Warminski demonstrates, such 'rhetorical reading' is a species of 'deconstructive reading' - in the full 'de Manian' sense - but one that, rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, would open the texts to a different future. Features: new readings of texts by Wordsworth, Keats, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Henry James; and essays and an interview on Paul de Man and 'Deconstruction at Yale'. It reflects on and exemplifies the pedagogical value of 'de Manian' rhetorical reading.

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The collection includes alphabet, calendar, list and found poems, as well as a sequence conceived as a ‘variable construction’, with one of many possible versions presented here. Many of the poems were written as collaborations with visual artists, and have appeared in booklets and exhibitions, and as public art works. Some were written as commissions, from organisations including The National Trust for Scotland and The Wordsworth Trust, or for occasions such as UNESCO World Heritage Day. Floating the Woods collects these poems at last into a single volume.

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Keep kids busy with this fun-filled i-SPY activity book Keep little travellers busy with this fun-filled i-SPY activity book. Packed with puzzles, photos and things to spot in the countryside for hours of entertainment. It’s bursting with boredom-busting puzzles including wordsearches, mazes, spot the difference, and more, plus there’s lots of things to spot in the countryside and points to score. Whether in the car, waiting at the airport, on the train, or on holiday i-SPY activity books provide hours of fun on kids’ travels!

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This delightful collection is published in association with The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the world-famous gardens that have been collecting and conserving plants for 260 years. The book is filled with delightful and calming puzzles and activities, including beautiful botanical colouring images, dot-to-dots, and a variety of popular puzzle types, all inspired by the horticultural, scientific and conservation work of the gardens. There are more than 100 activities and puzzles inside to help you find a moment of calm in your day and contemplate the beauty of the plants and nature that surround us.ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Publishing and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have collaborated to create a wonderful selection of botanical-themed arts, crafts, puzzle and activity books, including origami, dot-to-dots, colour-by-numbers, wordsearches and crosswords.

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Hillwalking is a way of life for Robin Howie, whose name is very well-known in Scottish hillwalking circles and whose knowledge of the Scottish high tops is second to none. For over ten years his popular weekly hillwalking column has appeared in The Scotsman where his pleasure of walking in the hills is apparent to the reader. Some claim to buy the paper solely to read his column while others have long-demanded that his walks be made into a book. Generous with his help and advice to other walkers, this collection of shorter, lower-level walks will appeal to families and those less sure of venturing to the high tops. Conveniently arranged within shires with a location map, each walk has a useful factfile that summarises the map, start point, distance, terrain, duration of walk, height to be climbed and the all-important nearest refreshment point. 100 Scotsman Walks is a distillation of a lifetime of highs and lows, enhanced by the artist's eye and the wordsmith's descriptive powers. It will be a delight for active or ex-walkers, for the would-be explorer or armchair enthusiast, for the whole family, young or old - a book in fact for everyone.

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Britain in the nineteenth century saw a series of technological and social changes which continue to influence and direct us today. Its reactants were human genius, money and influence, its crucibles the streets and institutions, its catalyst time, its control the market.In this rich and fascinating book, James Hamilton investigates the vibrant exchange between culture and business in nineteenth-century Britain, which became a centre for world commerce following the industrial revolution. He explores how art was made and paid for, the turns of fashion, and the new demands of a growing middle-class, prominent among whom were the artists themselves. While leading figures such as Turner, Constable, Landseer, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dickens are players here, so too are the patrons, financiers, collectors and industrialists; lawyers, publishers, entrepreneurs and journalists; artists' suppliers, engravers, dealers and curators; hostesses, shopkeepers and brothel keepers; quacks, charlatans and auctioneers. Hamilton brings them all vividly to life in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the business of culture in nineteenth-century Britain, and provides thrilling and original insights into the working lives of some of our most celebrated artists.

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Tim Cassedy’s fascinating study examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order. Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. This engagingly written story is sure to appeal to historians of literature, culture, and communication; to linguists and book historians; and to general readers interested in how ideas about English developed in the early United States and throughout the English-speaking world.

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Within the pages of Allie Esiri's gorgeous poetry collection, A Poem for Every Spring Day, you will find verse that will transport you to vivid spring-time scenes, taking you from the first sighting of blossoms to Easter.The poems are selected from Allie Esiri’s bestselling poetry anthologies A Poem for Every Day of the Year and A Poem for Every Night of the Year.Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with all the family, this book dazzles with an array of familiar favourites and remarkable new discoveries. These seasonal poems – together with introductory paragraphs – have a link to the date on which they appear.Includes poems by William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, John Donne and Emily Dickinson who sit alongside Ted Hughes, John Agard, Maya Angelou, Wendy Cope, John Cooper Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy.This soul-enhancing book will keep you company for every day and night of the Spring. Enjoy more seasonal poetry collections with A Poem for Every Summer Day and A Poem for Every Autumn Day.

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Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

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This striking Art Deco design comes from the celebrated British bookbinder Sybil Pye (1879–1959). It was crafted to hold a collection of William Wordsworth’s poems illustrated by Pye’s lifelong friend Thomas Sturge Moore.Self-taught, Pye began producing her first works in the early 1900s using naturally coloured leather, before graduating to multi-coloured panels. By 1934 she was creating complex covers of up to six different inlays, and her work was regularly exhibited around the world. One of the youngest pre–First World War women binders, Pye was the only binder in England who specialized in inlaid leather bindings. With this series, we pay tribute to a pioneering woman in the art of book design.

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Greene's fine sense of humor is displayed in this warm and far-reaching comic novel,Travels with My Aunt, a bestseller when it appeared originally. At his mother's funeral, Henry Pulling, a stuffy, retired bank manager with an interest in dahlias, meets his Aunt Augusta. The indomitable Aunt Augusta pulls Henry along on a whirlwind adventure traveling with an old lover, Wordsworth; Curran, the founder of a doggies' church; O'Toole, the C.I.A. man obsessed by statistics and his counterculture daughter; and old Mr. Visconti, who has been wanted by Interpol for twenty years. Henry describes his activities with shock and bewilderment, and, finally, with the tenderness of a fellow traveler going their way.

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