Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. A New Matrix for Modernism introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct...

This book seeks to include among accounts of modern lyric poetry a theory of the poem's relation to the unintelligible. DeSales Harrison draws a distinction between sites of unintelligibility and sights of difficulty; while much has been said about...

Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and...

This is the first sustained examination of Walt Whitman's influence on British socialism. Harris combines a contextual historical study of Whitman's reception with focused close readings of a variety of poems, books, articles, letters and speeches. She...

Sir John Denham (1614/15-1669) Reassessed shines new light on a singular, colourful yet elusive figure of seventeenth-century English letters. Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Denham,...

"The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves." -Harold Bloom In The Art of Reading Poetry, Harold Bloom gives us his critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about great...

Randall Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters. Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books...

Inscription and Modernity charts the vicissitudes of inscriptive poetry produced in the midst of the great and catastrophic political, social, and intellectual upheavals of the late 18th to mid 20th centuries. Drawing on the ideas of Geoffrey Hartman,...

What, for a poet, could 'passive making' mean? What does Wordsworth imagine he is doing, in commanding the moon to shine, the wind to blow in 'Tintern Abbey'? Heralded as the age of social contract and the Rights of Man, romanticism-this book...

A distinctive collection of more than 90 effective poetry-writing exercises combined with corresponding essays to inspire writers of all levels.

This study examines a selection of Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. Looking at Chesteron's relationship with and influence upon authors including...

Larkin's poems are often regarded as falling somewhere between the traditional 'plain' and the more contemporary 'postmodern' categories. This study undertakes a comprehensive linguistic and historical study of the plain style tradition in poetry, its...

In the Shadows of Divine Perfection provides an examination of Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990)- the St. Lucian poet's longest work, and the piece that secured his Nobel Laureate-that reveals the deep-seated bond between the root narratives of ancient...

Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore is the first monograph devoted to Moore's poetry, and argues for the value of attending to neglected aspects of Moore's poetic work through analysis of his shifting modes of authorship and...

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems...

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work...

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which...

400 after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. 'The Oxford Handbook of Milton' is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early 21st century, bringing together an...

Published in 1988: This book is a compilation of 16th century poetry and manuscripts.

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable...

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition - nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of...

This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical...

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to...

This edition first published in 1960.This book discusses the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration in the plays of Edward III, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and the lost Cardenio. It includes chapters on the dramatic value of the plays irrespective of...

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its...

This volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of 'life' in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of...

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a...

This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects...

Many readers are aware of Alfred Tennyson's treatment of legendary battles in such poems as Boadicea, The Revenge, Battle of Brunanburh, and Achilles over the Trench. Yet among Tennyson's most neglected works are his first battle poems, pieces that...

First published in 1950. This volume contains the essence of over three hundred well-known literary critics who, between 1661 and 1947, considered the great literary riddle of the years · Entries arranged chronologically by date of publication·...

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This...

From Plato's dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant's relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that...

First published in 1965, this reissue of the second edition of T. R. Henn's seminal study offers an impressive breadth and depth of meditations on the poetry of W. B. Yeats. His life and influences are discussed at length, from the impact of the Irish...