Search results for ""T. S. Eliot""

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

Read more less

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

Read more less

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry.Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.

Read more less

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by a generous selection of Keats's letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. In his tragically short life Keats wrote an astonishing number of superb poems; his stature as one of the foremost poets of the Romantic movement remains unassailable. This volume contains all the poetry published during his lifetime, including Endymion in its entirety, the Odes, 'Lamia', and both versions of 'Hyperion'. The poetry is presented in chronological sequence, illustrating the staggering speed with which Keats's work matured. Further insight into his creative process is given by reproducing, in their original form, a number of poems that were published posthumously. Keats's letters are admired almost as much as his poetry and were described by T. S. Eliot as 'certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet'. They provide the best biographical detail available and shed invaluable light on Keats's poems. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize, this new collection of expert lyric poems from Whitbread Poetry Award winner Bernard O'Donoghue movingly animates the scenery and characters of his childhood in County Cork. The mythologies of family are here: the relative who maybe emigrated to America to be 'set upon at his arrival / for the few pounds sewn inside his coat'; the memory of 'Barty, a hopeless speller', caned so hard he dances; the big top come to the town park; the stolen apples raided from the orchard near the old school. Here too are the collective myths, the groundwater of older texts - Virgil's Aeneid, the Riddles of the Exeter Book, Dante's Purgatorio, the lives of the ancients and the gods - all of which in O'Donoghue's dexterous and discerning care reach forward from their long-ago origins to echo down our own lives.Many of these poems speak in elegy: for Connolly's Bookshop - closed down and mourned - or for lost friends; for the nostalgic places to which one cannot return, the field-corners and long roads of the deep past: 'So wistful is the recognition now / of the places that I hardly noted'.The stunning title piece, and the deft and poignant poems that make up this collection, will confirm O'Donoghue's place as one of the most approachable and agile voices in contemporary Irish and British poetry.'I'm fascinated by O'Donoghue's wry vision, his infinitely gentle manner of displacing our more predictable reactions to things as they are so that we glimpse their underlying tragedy.' Tom Paulin

Read more less

“The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,” wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems,” Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America’s most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades—an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents—along with several lesser known—in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry “an American institution.” The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.

Read more less

Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity's cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)? Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot's Four Quartets and Jones's The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs "theological modernism": a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

Read more less

Being of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality. Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference. The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.

Read more less

Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary aesthetics." Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary critics and theorists. Documenting the hitherto unexplored relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message). Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action.

Read more less

The first poem in Gottfried Benn's first book, Morgue (1912) - written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after, or so the poet claimed - with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn's subsequent work.Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often hostile fate - the death of his mother from untreated cancer; the death of his first wife Edith in 1922; his brief but disastrous attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis in 1933, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife Herta in 1945, afraid she would fall into the hands of the Russians - the harsh, sometimes callous voice of the poems relented, softened, and mellowed. The later Benn - from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time - is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in what T. S. Eliot called the 'third voice' of poetry, the low un-upholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.With this new collection of poems selected and translated by Michael Hofmann, Gottfired Benn, at long last, promises to attain in English the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.

Read more less

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry.Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.

Read more less

Revision might seem to be an intrinsic part of good writing. But Hannah Sullivan argues that we inherit our faith in the virtues of redrafting from early-twentieth-century modernism. Closely examining changes made in manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others, she shows how modernist approaches to rewriting shaped literary style, and how the impulse to touch up, alter, and correct can sometimes go too far.In the nineteenth century, revision was thought to mar a composition’s originality—a prejudice cultivated especially by the Romantics, who believed writing should be spontaneous and organic, and that rewriting indicated a failure of inspiration. Rejecting such views, avant-garde writers of the twentieth century devoted themselves to laborious acts of rewriting, both before and after publishing their work. The great pains undertaken in revision became a badge of honor for writers anxious to justify the value and difficulty of their work. In turn, many of the distinctive effects of modernist style—ellipsis, fragmentation, parataxis—were produced by zealous, experimental acts of excision and addition.The early twentieth century also saw the advent of the typewriter. It proved the ideal tool for extensive, multi-stage revisions—superior even to the word processor in fostering self-scrutiny and rereading across multiple drafts. Tracing how master stylists from Henry James to Allen Ginsberg have approached their craft, The Work of Revision reveals how techniques developed in the service of avant-garde experiment have become compositional orthodoxy.

Read more less

Making No Compromise is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art. Imagism, Dada, surrealism, and Machine Age aesthetics were among the radical trends the Little Review promoted and introduced to US audiences. Anderson and Heap published the early work of the "men of 1914"—Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot—and promoted women writers such as Djuna Barnes, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and the inimitable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the mid-1920s Anderson and Heap became adherents of George I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic, and in 1929 ceased publication of the Little Review. Holly A. Baggett examines the roles of radical politics, sexuality, modernism, and spirituality and suggests that Anderson and Heap's interest in esoteric questions was evident from the early days of the Little Review. Making No Compromise tells the story of two women who played an important role in shaping modernism.

Read more less

An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts. Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

Read more less

'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell’s own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell’s stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell

Read more less

Iris Barry (1895-1969) was a pivotal modern figure and one of the first intellectuals to treat film as an art form, appreciating its far-reaching, transformative power. Although she had the bearing of an aristocrat, she was the self-educated daughter of a brass founder and a palm-reader from the Isle of Man. An aspiring poet, Barry attracted the attention of Ezra Pound and joined a demimonde of Bloomsbury figures, including Ford Maddox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Waley, Edith Sitwell, and William Butler Yeats. She fell in love with Pound's eccentric fellow Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, and had two children by him. In London, Barry pursued a career as a novelist, biographer, and critic of motion pictures. In America, she joined the modernist Askew Salon, where she met Alfred Barr, director of the new Museum of Modern Art. There she founded the museum's film department and became its first curator, assuring film's critical legitimacy. She convinced powerful Hollywood figures to submit their work for exhibition, creating a new respect for film and prompting the founding of the International Federation of Film Archives. Barry continued to augment MoMA's film library until World War II, when she joined the Office of Strategic Services to develop pro-American films with Orson Welles, Walt Disney, John Huston, and Frank Capra. Yet despite her patriotic efforts, Barry's "foreignness" and association with such filmmakers as Luis Bunuel made her the target of an anticommunist witch hunt. She eventually left for France and died in obscurity. Drawing on letters, memorabilia, and other documentary sources, Robert Sitton reconstructs Barry's phenomenal life and work while recasting the political involvement of artistic institutions in the twentieth century.

Read more less

This second volume in Caruso St John’s Collected Works traces an interlacing set of themes through the celebrated practice’s work over the first twelve years of the twenty-first century. Their unique approach to history is revealed as a rejection of the myth of relentless novelty in favour of an understanding of the past as present and an interest in working with the existing. The influences of Milan, Chicago, and Rome on understandings of the city are explored, as well as the use of ornament and the place of Switzerland in shaping the practice’s evolving trajectory. Throughout these contexts, collaborations with contemporary artists including Thomas Demand and Damien Hirst continue to shape their relations to the materiality and drama of space. This volume encompasses some of Caruso St John’s most renowned projects, including works on historic buildings such as Tate Britain and the Barbican and new projects such as Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery and Europaallee Mixed-use Building in Zurich. These are presented along with exhibition designs, competition entries, and lesser-known projects, all with an unprecedented range of materials including unseen drawings, references, and new commentaries. The cultural environment in which this work took place is captured in reviews and essays from the period and a diverse range of writings that informed Adam Caruso’s and Peter St John’s thinking and teaching, from T. S. Eliot to Rosalind Krauss to Louis Sullivan. Between these projects and lessons, references and buildings emerges an invitation to attend to the ‘alchemy of the everyday’ – one with the potential to transform our understanding of the world and the ways we continue to build it.

Read more less

For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling and endlessly fascinating: this elegant book seeks to explore why. What is it that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones? Ruins and Fragments guides us through ancient and modern worlds, sharing tales of loss, recovery and rediscovery. Beginning with ancient fragments, this book recounts how later history has recuperated, restored and exhibited them, and even how ruins have been found in unlikely places - such as a Hellenistic fragment from Pergamon located in remote Nottinghamshire. It considers modernist architecture's fragmentary effects, and how concrete made some buildings look prematurely ruined. It also explores architecture that has worked with ruins, from the Castelvecchio in Verona to the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. In literature, from T. S. Eliot to Laurence Sterne, writers revel in fragments and create anew from literary rubble.Some people deliberately construct or destroy to create ruin, Gordon Matta-Clark attacking buildings, for example, or dispossessed youth scribbling graffiti. Ultimately, destruction is balanced by attempts at reconstruction. Whether focusing on ancient or modern remnants, literature or the visual arts, Ruins and Fragments is poetic without being sentimental. Far from 'ruin lust', this book seeks to explore fragments without fetishizing them. In doing so it offers new ways of understanding the history of modernity, while delighting in our perception of the world as a puzzle and the ways in which we can construct new forms of meaning.

Read more less

Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial PrizeWinner of the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full CollectionShortlisted for the 2015 T. S. Eliot PrizeShortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First CollectionIn this remarkable, intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological fast-forward from submerged Devonian forests and a Paleolithic cave-bear skull to the site of decommissioned submarines at HMNB Devonport, where the sea is ‘still a torpedo-path, / an Armageddon road’. She explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing – from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen – and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing. A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focussed exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity. In these poems, as in all the poems in this impressive debut, we feel keenly the sense of life lived at the edge of threat – catastrophe, even – but also on the cusp of beauty and happiness. Other poems about the bewildering loss of miscarriage are hard to read and impossible to forget, moving with grace and authority through great grief to arrive at a hard-won destination of selfless, unqualified love.‘I remember again / the corridor / of the labour ward // and that woman / sitting weeping / with her man // having given birth / to a death – / small grey face, // no breath, / something you cannot help / but love – // habibi, akushla, /I go home alone / but carry you, // courie you, / little slipped thing, / to the ends of the earth.’

Read more less

American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism "like wet sox and gin before breakfast." It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from "serious" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that defined McClure's, The Crisis, Time, Life, Esquire, and others. On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Working across the borders of media history, the sociology of literature, print culture, and literary studies, Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture. Starting in the 1890s, a growing number of writers found steady paychecks and regular publishing opportunities as editors and reporters at big magazines. Often privileging innovative style over late-breaking content, these magazines prized novelists and poets for their innovation and attention to literary craft. In recounting this history, On Company Time challenges the narrative of decline that often accompanies modernism's incorporation into midcentury middlebrow culture. Its integrated account of literary and journalistic form shows American modernism evolving within as opposed to against mass print culture. Harris's work also provides an understanding of modernism that extends beyond narratives centered on little magazines and other "institutions of modernism" that served narrow audiences. And for the writers, the "double life" of working for these magazines shaped modernism's literary form and created new models of authorship.

Read more less

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six offending poems were banned, in a conviction that was not overturned until 1949. This bold new translation, which restores the banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection, makes available to English speakers a powerful and original version of the world. Jonathan Culler's Introduction outlines this vision, stressing that Baudelaire is more than just the poet of the modern city. Originally to be called `The Lesbians', The Flowers of Evil contains the most extraordinary body of love poetry. The poems also pose the question of the role of evil in our lives, of whether there are not external forces working to frustrate human plans and to enlist men and women on appalling or stultifying scenarios not of their own making. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Read more less

A selection of letters by the pacifist and noted art critic Clive Bell, expertly annotated by his biographer Illustrates a comprehensive range of Bell's interests and relationships Offers a unique record of a transformative time in the cultural and political history of the West Arranged in eight categories to afford readers guidance in how to approach the varied emphases of Bell's life and interests, as well as highlighting what is particularly significant, such as his close lifelong relationship with Virginia Woolf Clive Bell was a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury Group. His marriage to Vanessa Bell and his, at times tempestuous, relations with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf form important strands in the cultural history of modernism. A tireless champion of modernist art, a committed pacifist and conscientious objector, Bell produced a huge body of correspondence with many of the leading artistic and political figures of his time. His lively, witty, highly opinionated letters are a window into the turbulence of the early twentieth century, populated by friends and acquaintances including T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as his Bloomsbury set, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. Arranged in eight categories Bloomsbury Circles; Virginia; War; Arts and Letters; To the Editor; Francophile; Travels; Love, Gossip, Home this selection emphasises Bell's enormously varied life and interests. Born in the reign of Queen Victoria and living long enough to have been able to hear the Beatles on the radio, these letters demonstrate that Bell's appetite for art, for love and for peace never flagged.

Read more less

God is dead,' Nietzsche famously declared in The Gay Science; but this book will investigate God's surprising persistence and resurrection in the works of even the most seemingly atheistic of writers, who continue to deploy Judaic and Christian narratives and tropes even as they radically rewrite them in the face of new cultural, political and scientific imperatives. Contributors explore the range, power and implication of Christian and Jewish heresies in canonical Anglo-American writers -- including Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, T S Eliot, John Steinbeck and Jim Crace -- as well as in some less familiar texts: the Mormon Scriptures of Joseph Smith and various Victorian rewritings of the Book of Esther. A polemical essay by Michelene Wandor reflects on conceptions of Jewishness, which she finds in need of heretical renewal. Valentine Cunningham's provocative introduction argues that the acts of literary writing and reading are necessarily heretical. A coda to the book, Between Heresy and Superstition', takes as its motto Thomas Huxley's observation in 1881 that It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.' Contributions offer readers a rare opportunity of witnessing an extended academic exchange -- exploring the process by which former heresies may indeed risk ossification as new kinds of doctrinal conformity. Bryan Cheyette's critique of the Christian Albums' of Bob Dylan is answered by Kevin Mills's essay which uncovers heretical possibility even in this most seemingly orthodox part of Dylan's work. The revitalisation of heresy in literary interpretations, as well as in our religious thinking, forms the guiding objective of this exciting critical book.

Read more less

William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved.

Read more less

To celebrate FSG's 75th anniversary, here is a unique anthology celebrating the riches and variety of its poetry list-past, present, and future Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. to the company. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Giroux's first generation was augmented by a group of international figures (and Nobel laureates), including Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky. Over time the list expanded to includes poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Carl Phillips, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Schuyler, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski. Today, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, Ishion Hutchinson, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Valzhyna Mort, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel are among the poets who are continuing FSG's tradition as a discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary voices. This anthology is a wide-ranging showcase of some of the best poems published in America over the past three generations. It is also a sounding of poetry's present and future.

Read more less

Focusing on the vexed friendship between Hart Crane and Allen Tate, this book examines twentieth-century American poetry's progress toward institutional sanction and professional organization, a process in which sexual identities, poetic traditions, and literary occupations were in question and at stake. Langdon Hammer combines biography and formalist analysis to argue that American modernism was a Janus-faced phenomenon, at once emancipatory and elitist, which simultaneously attacked traditional cultural authority and reconstructed it in new forms. Hammer shows how Crane and Tate, working in relation to each other and to T. S. Eliot, created for themselves the competing roles of "genius" and "poet-critic." Crane embraced the self-authorizing powers of the individual talent at the cost of standing outside the emerging consensus of high modernist literary culture, an aesthetic isolation which converged with his social isolation as a gay man. Tate, turning against Crane, linked the modernist defense of tradition to an embattled heterosexual masculinity, while he adapted Eliot's stance to a career sustained by criticism and teaching. Ending his book with a discussion of Robert Lowell's career, Hammer maintains that Lowell's "confessional" poetry recapitulates the conflict enacted by Crane and Tate. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Read more less

Pursuing a dream is hard work, but the right words delivered at the right time—by people who’ve been there and done that—can give us just the motivation we need. The right words can rekindle our enthusiasm, re-energize our efforts, dispel doubt, let us know we’re not alone, and show us that the fight is worth it—and winnable. Kathryn and Ross Petras are masters at choosing and delivering just the right words. Their books—such as “Age Doesn’t Matter Unless You’re a Cheese” and “Dance First. Think Later.”—and bestselling calendar, The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said, have over 5.2 million copies in print. Now comes a book for dreamers and doers, plus writers, entrepreneurs, graduates, artists, future movers and shakers. Collecting the hard-won, brilliantly expressed advice from pioneers who have paved the way, including everyone from Rumi to Steve Jobs, Michelangelo to Oprah to Tina Fey, “It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done” is like a rousing locker-room speech, inspiring courage, commitment, and perseverance.“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” —Michael Jordan“Go for it, baby! Life ain’t no dress rehearsal.” —Tallulah Bankhead “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” —Neil Gaiman“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” —T. S. Eliot“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” —Nelson Mandela

Read more less

American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism "like wet sox and gin before breakfast." It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from "serious" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that defined McClure's, The Crisis, Time, Life, Esquire, and others. On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Working across the borders of media history, the sociology of literature, print culture, and literary studies, Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture. Starting in the 1890s, a growing number of writers found steady paychecks and regular publishing opportunities as editors and reporters at big magazines. Often privileging innovative style over late-breaking content, these magazines prized novelists and poets for their innovation and attention to literary craft. In recounting this history, On Company Time challenges the narrative of decline that often accompanies modernism's incorporation into midcentury middlebrow culture. Its integrated account of literary and journalistic form shows American modernism evolving within as opposed to against mass print culture. Harris's work also provides an understanding of modernism that extends beyond narratives centered on little magazines and other "institutions of modernism" that served narrow audiences. And for the writers, the "double life" of working for these magazines shaped modernism's literary form and created new models of authorship.

Read more less

Happenstance Press ‘This is the internet generation, and the references in these poems pull with abandon from a huge territory. If the general thrust is to embrace, the poems have in common, the courage to sing out and explore.’ -- Sally Festing, Heppenstance Press‘There’s always talk of ‘saving’ poetry; it’s fine, becomes deeper and wider each year. Don’t believe me? Open up this anthology and read words cajoled into new shapes so they might move or disturb you (and sometimes both) with all their bright surprises.’ -- Martin Figura, Saboteur Best Spoken Word Award winner 2013 ‘Here is a book of poetic tangents, setting words and worlds at a tangent to each other. Words are not to be taken for granted, of course. Nor are they. This is the way the future comes flying at you. At a tangent. And the voices fitting in the space there, like the stones in a fruit.’ -- George Szirtes, T S Eliot Prize winner 2004, 2009‘I view the UEA MA creative writing anthology as a barometer of what’s going on in the poetry world, and this year’s collection does not disappoint. Poems range from the lyrical to the experimental and each voice is exciting and unique. I look forward to hearing more from these poets in the future.’ -- Julia Webb, Forward Prize Shortlist 2017This year's anthology contains work from 12 exciting new voices: Dario Biagini, Fern Broome Richards, Paul Frederik Carlsen, David Charles Gill, Rich Law, Naomi Madlock, S.Z. Mason, Molly Ellen Pearson, Jake Reynolds, Olivia Walwyn, Arron Westbrook, and E.F. Willis, with a foreword by Paul Mills and introduction from Sophie Robinson.

Read more less

An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts. Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

Read more less

The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The author's purpose is to clear the ground for a systematic aesthetics of poetry consistent with the insights of our most influential contemporary literary critics. The book is concerned with those of the so-called "new critics" who are trying to answer the need, forced on them by historical and cultural pressures, to justify poetry by securing for it a unique function for which modern "scientism" cannot find a substitute.This volume provides intensive analyses of work by critics of several persuasions: T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, and, for purposes of contrast, D. G. James, R. S. Crane, Elder Olson, and Max Eastman. Allen Tate, the poet and critic, writes: "Mr. Krieger's book is the most searching in scholarship and the most profound in critical analysis of the existing books in this field." Robert B. Heilman, critic and teacher, comments: "The author's knowledge of a complex field and his mastery of the analytical techniques which he is applying to a chosen set of critical positions are very impressive. He not only clarifies the positions of various contemporary critics by examining them in the light of the same set of general principles, but also provides some helpful, at times brilliant, insights into the works of various critics from the Greeks up to the present. He traces the history of concepts and thus establishes relationships among individual critics and critical schools."

Read more less

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-- Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others--sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world. In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another's ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.

Read more less

Seamus Heaney & the End of Catholic Ireland takes off from the poet’s growing awareness in the new millennium of “something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.” It then pursues an examination of the full trajectory of Heaney’s religious beliefs as represented in his poetry, prose, and interviews, with a briefer account of the interactive religious histories of the Irish and international contexts in which he lived. Thus, in the 1940s and 50s, Heaney was inducted into the narrow, punitive, but also enabling Catholicism of the era. In the early 1960s he was witness to the lively religious debates from the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God to the seismic disruptions of Vatican II. When the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants broke out, Heaney was forced to dig deep for an imaginative understanding of its religious roots. From the 1980s on, Heaney more and more proclaimed his own religious loss while also recognizing the institution’s residual value in an Irish society of rising prosperity, weariness with the atrocities of a partly religion-inspired IRA, and beset by the scandals of sex abuse among the clergy. Kieran Quinlan sees Heaney as an exemplar of this period of major change in Ireland as he engaged the religious issue not only in major writers such as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, and Czeslaw Mi?osz, but also in a diverse array of less familiar commentators lay and clerical, creative and academic, believers and unbelievers, Irish and international. Breaking new ground by expanding the scope of Heaney’s religious preoccupations and writing in an accessible, reflective, and sometimes provocative manner, Quinlan’s study places Heaney in his universe, and that universe in turn in its wider intellectual setting.

Read more less

American children's poetry began with Native American cradle songs, moved on to a rhymed alphabet, blossomed in the 19th century with "A Visit from St. Nicholas," expanded widely in the 20th century, and continues with vigor into the new millennium. Some of the best of these poems, however, have been neglected or forgotten. This collection, edited by acclaimed children's author and poet Donald Hall, returns the forgotten treasures of American children's poetry. Featuring some of the best of children's book illustration-including archival selections from rare and early editions and pictures from now defunct 19th- and early-20th-century children's magazines-this anthology revives not only the classic poems but also the atmosphere of the periods in which they were written and read.Starting with anonymous Native American verses and a selection from the 1727 New England Primer, "Alphabet," this book spans two centuries of American children's poetry. Immediately recognizable names, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and T. S. Eliot are joined by talented contemporary poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Janet S. Wong, and others. Perennial favorites-such as "The Three Little Kittens" and "Casey at the Bat"-are mixed in with new classics, such as Shel Silverstein's "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out." Poems about holidays appear with verses for recitation, nursery rhymes, poems for laughter, bedtime verses, scary poems, and animal poems. In recognition of America's diverse nature, the selections in this anthology reflect a variety of backgrounds and experiences. From anonymous African-American poets we step forward through the ages to admire the talents of Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, and Francisco X. Alarcón. Children will love discovering these gems, and both parents and teachers will delight in reading to children from this book.

Read more less

When Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the crowd rioted in response to the harsh dissonance and jarring rhythms of its score. This was noise, not music. In Sublime Noise, Josh Epstein examines the significance of noise in modernist music and literature. How - and why - did composers and writers incorporate the noises of modern industry, warfare, and big-city life into their work? Epstein argues that, as the creative class engaged with the racket of cityscapes and new media, they reconsidered not just the aesthetic of music but also its cultural effects. Noise, after all, is more than a sonic category: it is a cultural value judgment - a way of abating and categorizing the sounds of a social space or of new music. Pulled into dialogue with modern music's innovative rhythms, noise signaled the breakdown of art's autonomy from social life-even the "old favorites" of Beethoven and Wagner took on new cultural meanings when circulated in noisy modern contexts. The use of noise also opened up the closed space of art to the pressures of publicity and technological mediation. Building both on literary cultural studies and work in the "new musicology," Sublime Noise examines the rich material relationship that exists between music and literature. Through close readings of modernist authors, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound, and composers, including George Antheil, William Walton, Erik Satie, and Benjamin Britten, Epstein offers a radically contemporary account of musical-literary interactions that goes well beyond pure formalism. This book will be of interest to scholars of Anglophone literary modernism and to musicologists interested in how music was given new literary and cultural meaning during that complex interdisciplinary period.

Read more less

On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land’s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influenceWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music.From its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.”Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem.

Read more less

An introduction to poetry geared toward the study of song “Fusing an approach that engages both lyrics and musical content of English-language songs in a wide swath of genres, Lines and Lyrics gives readers the tools and concepts to help them better interpret songs, in an accessible and enjoyable format.”—Victoria Malawey, author of A Blaze of Light In Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice “I can think of no other book that juxtaposes art song and pop song so effectively, in a way that doesn’t privilege one over the other. This is a real achievement, and a must-have for anyone who loves words and songs.”—Stephen Rodgers, University of Oregon Bruce Springsteen, Benjamin Britten, Kendrick Lamar, Sylvia Plath, Outkast, and Anne Sexton collide in this inventive study of poetry and song. Drawing on literary poetry, rock, rap, musical theater, and art songs from the Elizabethan period to the present, Matt BaileyShea reveals how every issue in poetry has an important corresponding status in song, but one that is always transformed. Beginning with a discussion of essential features such as diction, meter, and rhyme, the book progresses into the realms of lineation, syntax, form, and address, and culminates in an analysis of two complete songs. Throughout, BaileyShea places classical composers and poets in conversations with contemporary songwriters and musicians (T. S. Eliot and Johnny Cash, Aaron Copland and Pink Floyd) so that readers can make close connections across time, genres, and fields, but also recognize inherent differences. To aid the reader, the author has created a Spotify playlist of all the music discussed in this book and provides time cues throughout, enabling readers to listen to the music as they read.

Read more less

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Read more less

Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations. Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. Issue 24 features twenty-two “flash fictions” by established and emerging fiction writers, including Ed Falco, Robert Long Foreman, Stephanie Dickinson, Pedro Ponce, Matthew Salesses, Ruth Joffre, Danielle Lazarin, Joseph Aguilar, Thomas Legendre, Patricia Murphy, Wendy Oleson, Alicita Rodríguez, and Thaddeus Rutkowski. Also featured are translation folios by Italian experimental poet and computer scientist Lorenzo Carlucci, Brazilian poet and PEN Brazil National Prize Winner Denise Emmer, and internationally renowned Russian poet Tatiana Shcherbina. Other contributors include poets Kaveh Akbar, Adam Tavel, David Dodd Lee, Kerri French, Ashley Keyser, Ryan Sharp, Kevin Craft, J. Allyn Rosser, Zeina Hashem Beck, Ed Bok Lee, John A. Nieves, &c.; fiction writers Bradley Bazzle, Erin Kate Ryan, and T. D. Storm; and nonfiction writers Aimée Baker, Dan Beachy-Quick, and S. Farrell Smith.

Read more less

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 T. S. ELIOT PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZEA GUARDIAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A wonder of a collection' Caleb Azumah Nelson'Thrilling ... once-in-a-generation' Jackie Kay'Genius ... tells a thousand stories in stunningly crafted verse' Nikita Gill'Remarkable, textured ... Yomi Sode is a beautiful storyteller' Candice Carty-Williams'Heartbreaking ... This debut is the living heart and soul of contemporary poetry' Pascale Petit'Vivid, beautiful and deeply moving' Rt Hon Diane Abbott MP'Yomi Sode writes with clarity, anger and love' Andrew Graham-Dixon'Searing, shimmering, brilliant' Yrsa Daley-Ward'A must for all lovers of poetry and its power' Roger Robinson'Manorism is a classic' Caleb FemiImpassioned, insightful, electric, Manorism is a poetic examination of the lives of Black British men and boys: propped up and hemmed in by contemporary masculinity, deepened by family, misrepresented in the media, and complicated by the riches, and the costs, of belonging and inheritance. It is also an exploration of the differences of impunity afforded to white and Black people, and to white and Black artists.Caravaggio - originally, unexpectedly - looms large: as a man who moved between spheres of exalted patronage and petty criminality; as a painter who, amid the elegant conventions of late Mannerism, forged his own style of visceral dark and light; and as an individual whose recognized genius was allowed to legitimate and excuse his violence.In this profound and moving debut, Yomi Sode asks: what does it mean to find oneself between worlds - to 'code-switch', adapting one's speech and manners to widely differing cultural contexts? Who is, and who isn't, allowed to be more than their origins? And what do we owe each other? What do we owe ourselves?

Read more less

Anthologies have been a powerful force in poetry and criticism in English ever since the earliest extant book of this kind was published in the sixteenth century. A theoretical, historical, and critical inquiry, Anne Ferry's book looks in detail at the assumptions anthologies are predicated on, how they are put together, the treatment of the poems in them, and the effects their presentations have on their readers' experiences of the poems. In an anthology the work of many poets is selected and arranged by someone whose aim is to make, out of the writings of others, a book of which the anthologist is the author. Part I explains the classifying terms and defining dimensions—conceptual, spatial, temporal—that make the anthology a unique kind of book. It also explores and illustrates the ways that the presence of the anthologist—in arranging, annotating, titling, and revising the poems—directs how they are read. As examples, Ferry focuses on the three most historically influential of anthologies: Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and Francis Palgrave's The Golden Treasury. Part II asks how the poems most frequently included in anthologies get there: by what cultural situations, literary circumstances, and internal features. Examples include a group of Renaissance pastoral lyrics, three public poems of 1770, 1867, and 1955, and Elizabeth Bishop's narrative-descriptive poem "The Fish." Part III describes how poets themselves, as readers and compilers of anthologies, have used them, and how anthologies have contributed to the making of poems and the making of their reception. A Coda shows how T. S. Eliot wove certain of his writings into an imaginary anthology that figures his conception of tradition and the individual talent.

Read more less

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace-and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"- the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury- John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others-and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.

Read more less

Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose `heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us `in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. `Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, `where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb `birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby `in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. `Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that `flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: `a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.

Read more less

Philip G Johnston's new translation of Un rio, un amor (One River, One Love) by Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is faithful to the author's quasi-Surrealist intentions. Written in France and Spain in 1928-1929, this collection reflects the influences, conflicts and impulses that governed the poet's life then. It speaks of the alienation of a marginalised, disaffected individual in a Spain which he described as "decrepit and decomposing", of a shy homosexual gradually and painfully coming to terms with his orientation in a rigid, hostile society, of a passion for American popular culture (Jazz, Blues and cinema), filtered through a Hispanic sensitivity, and eventually somewhat tempered by the disappointments of daily life. The collection's later poems see Cernuda finding an admirable and resonant voice of protest. Very much a part of the broad European Modernist ethos (Cernuda can justifiably be compared to, say, T S Eliot), One River, One Love is furthermore written in the spirit of Spain's famous Generation of 1927 (spearheaded by figures such as Dali, Lorca and Bunuel) which set about reacting to "what had already been said", seeking the radical reform of the Spanish aesthetic and, in doing so, created a second Spanish Golden Age. Intriguingly balanced between what Cernuda himself would later term "Reality and Desire", this collection also involves a significant flirtation with the conventions of Surrealism. Lautreamont's famous formula involving the sewing machine, the umbrella and the dissection table is most certainly nodded to here in the characteristic Cernudian harnessing of shocking, incongruous and unexpected elements in imagery. That flirtation, however, stops short of full consummation of the relationship (Cernuda never, for example, gives himself completely over to unfettered, automatic writing, or, "dictee de la pensee") -which fact in itself speaks of a peculiarly Spanish twist to the European avant-garde.

Read more less

Many of the ideas that appear in Arnold's Preface of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Analysis of the Preface reveals a poet who found a theoretical basis for poetry (by which he means literature in general) in the dramas of the Greek tragedians, particularly Sophocles: action is stressed as an indispensable ingredient, wholes are preferred to parts, the didactic function of literature is promoted -- in short, the Preface reads like the recipe for a classical tragedy. It is a young poet's attempt to establish criteria for what poetry ought to be. He found the Romantic idiom outworn. Literature was, in Arnold's perception, meant to communicate a message rather than impress by its structure or by formal sophistication. Modern theories of coalescence between content and form were outside the contemporary paradigm. T S Eliot's ambivalent attitude to Arnold -- now reluctantly admiring, now decidedly patronizing -- is puzzling. Eliot never seemed able to liberate himself from the influence of Arnold. What in Arnold's critical oeuvre attracted and at the same time repelled Eliot? That question has led to an in-depth analysis of Arnold as a literary critic. This book begins with an examination of Arnold's letters to Clough, where "it all started" and proceeds with a close reading of the 1853 Preface. A look at some of the later literary essays rounds off the picture of Arnold as a literary critic. This work is the result of Reader and Review comments of the author's well received Eliot's Objective Criticism: Tradition or Individual Talent? "Yet he is in some respects the most satisfactory man of letters of his age." -- T S Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

Read more less

This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized.Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire.Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry

Read more less

This book provides a full-scale interpretation of Marianne Moore's poetry and prose, starting with her early experiments and exploring the range and variety of her artistic achievement. It portrays the self-discipline and the fidelity to experience that were the source of her originality. Laurence Stapleton's study of unpublished manuscripts, including notebooks, drafts of poems, and correspondence, supports her account of Marianne Moore's progress in the mastery of form. Her methods of work in the early satires, in the more openly constructed poems of the 1930s, and in the major ones of World War II, emerge in the context of her life as a professional writer. The spontaneity and inventiveness of her later books resulted from her La Fontaine translation and her response to music, to painting, and to the changing American scene. Constantly in view are Marianne Moore's literary relationships with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, as well as her appeal to a large circle of readers that made her become "New York's laureate." The insight that may be gained from this book should bring a better understanding of her accomplishment and of her place in American literature. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Read more less