Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and cultureAn unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the...

The most comprehensive publication of Kodojin beautiful and mysterious a collection of more than 100 paintings with the English translations of his inscribed Chinese poems. The Art and Life of Fukuda Kodojin is the first publication in English to offer...

Liz Lochhead is one of the leading poets writing in Britain today. Her debut collection, Memo for Spring (1972), was a landmark publication. Writing at a time when the landscape of Scottish poetry was male dominated, hers was a fresh, new voice, tackling...

Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey collaborated to help achieve the biggest electoral success for socialism in recent British history. The two men share a passionate belief in a fairer, more equal Britain, encapsulated in Labour's election slogan...

This collected edition of Sorley MacLean brings together published poetry from MacLean's own edited volumes of poetry, poetry previously published in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies, and poetry which has never been published...

Home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today.Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That...

In the new second volume of Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including...

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Volume 1) offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas...

Wandering in Circles: Venichka's Journey of Redemption in "Moskva-Petushki" examines the definition of redemption in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki. By placing Erofeev's poema, this work offers a new reading of the text as a journey of failed social...

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of...

For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the "mythopoetic thinking" that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to...

Mystical Vertigo immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic Hebrew poet, serving as a gateway into the poet's quest for mystical union known as devekut. This journey oscillates across subtle degrees of devekut-causing an entranced...

A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an...

Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) is a major original figure of Russian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, whose oeuvre has remained unexplored and unstudied. The first scholarly study of the poet, Marat Grinberg's book substantially fills this...

This is the first bilingual annotated edition of two landmark autobiographies by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italian women poets.In 1826 Angela Veronese, a gardener's daughter, wrote and published the first modern autobiography...

Mysterious, esoteric, and baffling, John Ashbery is notorious for the seeming difficulty of his work. But Ashbery is also entertaining, humorous, even charming, and ever responsive to his shifting social and political contexts. This biography charts...

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and...

What motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts? In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the...

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day...Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to...

The books collects Daniel T. O'Hara's half century of essays and review-essays on Yeats and his major poetry an drama and how leading critics and theorists have sought to revise their reception for their periods of time and indeed for the future. Its aim...

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account...

William Blake as Natural Philosopher,1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake's wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of...

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. It begins with an introduction summarizing the work that has already been...

Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now forThe Autobiography of a Super-Trampand poems such as 'Leisure', which came 14th in the BBC's search to find 'The Nation's Favourite Poems', no...

The first ever modern edition of Bernard Barton's selected verse, recovering an important and prolific figure from the Romantic era. Instantly recognisable to his contemporaries as 'the Quaker poet', Barton wrote nature and landscape poetry in a...

The first, lucidly compelling, book-length study on the oeuvre of a major contemporary poet and female writer who evinces a vital literary intelligenceThis book-length study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of...

The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry is the first book-length study of the contemporary poetry industry. By documenting radical changes over the past decade in the way poems are published, sold, and consumed, it connects the...

This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Revealing questions about...

A study of the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth centuryFocusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry...

My book traces the significant poetic and political contributions made by non-canonical women poets, situating women's poetry both in colonial Australian print culture and in wider imperial and transnational contexts. Women poets in colonial Australia...

Vysa is the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahbhrata and Vysa Redux examines the many paradoxical dimensions of his narrative virtuosity in the poem where the poet is both the creator of the work and a character within it. The book also...

Byron's and Shelley's experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the...

This innovative edition brings together previously lost material to chart the genesis of a key work in 20th-century Modernist poetryWhen Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had 'started writing like mad' and produced 'a sententious prose book,...

In 1801, some five years after Robert Burns' death, nine of his friends sat down to dinner in what is now known as Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his extraordinary life and to give thanks for his friendship. Over the years the informal theme from...

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: Jos Mart, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them. These three interlocutors-the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary...

An engaging, moving, and poignant book of poetry from a well-known leader, educator, and writer with notable endorsements from Reverend Billy Talen (Church of Stop Shopping), Carolyn Martin (poetry editor at Kosmos Journal), and Alice Reys (Singer...

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and...

This is Marjorie's sixth book with Coffee House. We're honored that a poet of her stature and influence is loyal to our press. She is truly an icon of experimental and modernist poetry. This collection engages deeply with the challenging legacy of Ezra...

"The translator must keep faith with the deeper need that poetry fulfills in our lives, [to] discover not what the poem says but what it does."-Tony Barnstone, in his essay "Poem Behind the Poem"The translation of Asian poetry into Western languages has...

Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's Gothic imagination seeks to redress...

Spenser's ethics offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy's profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonisation of Ireland in the turbulent 1580's and...

The Anglo-Welsh aristocrats George Herbert (15931633) and Edward Herbert (15831648) are striking examples of an early European republic of letters in a moment of transition, before and during the Thirty Years War.Each in his own way conceived of his...

The narrative grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas's The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar's The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in...

This volume completes John Kinsella's trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in 'the world-at-large'...

Sheep are marginalised in literary criticism and in discussion of pastoral literature. This book brings an animal studies approach to poetry about sheep that allows for the agency of these sentient beings, that have been associated for humans over ten...

Dante Beyond Influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly...

The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of...