African American Poets: Lives, Works, and Sources by
Covering 46 poets from more than two centuries of African American literary history, this biocritical dictionary is an important contribution to any reference collection. The poets are situated within their historical and literary context, and for each a brief biographical sketch is given, with information on the poet's personal history, education, influences, and accomplishments. Each entry examines the poet's work as a whole, with a discussion of selected important poems and their recurrent themes. Students and interested readers will gain a good appreciation for the stylistic features and artistic contributions made by these African American poets. For further research, each essay concludes with a list of the poet's published book-length works, anthologies where their poetry appears, and information on reference resources. This reference work is introduced with an insightful overview of the significant developments and contributions in African American poetry, from the 18th century poetry of Phillis Wheatley, through the major arts movements including the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movements of the 1960s, up to the present time. This thoughtful dictionary explores both the aesthetic and the social functions of the literary movements, as well as the individual poet's contributions to the body of poetic output. Covered here are numerous contemporary African American voices such as Maya Angelou, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove. Alongside the names synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, are lesser known poets about whom students often have trouble finding information but whose contributions are no less significant.
American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation by
Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures--Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman--who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl--a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.
Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass by
Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind America's most celebrated collection of poems. In the first book-length study of Walt Whitman's journals and manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass), Whitman--who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a play--was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all. Collage of Myself details Whitman's discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers." Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to "cut and paste" his lines into ever-evolving forms based on what he called "spinal ideas." This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the technique later known as collage, an observation with significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artists and writers. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art. Using the Walt Whitman Archive's collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of this great American literary icon.
E.E. Cummings by
Throughout the forty-five years of his professional writing life, Edward Estlin Cummings consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, experimented boldly with words and syntax and punctuation, and wrote some of the most erotic and tender love poetry in the English language. Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman's one living descendant," Cummings sang of himself and of America in a unique voice, as resonant now as it was a half-century ago. Charismatic and famous among the famous, Cummings always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and was a major presence wherever he resided, whether in Cambridge, Europe or New York. He counted some of the most important artists of his time as friends: Pound, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and many more. "Sawyer-Lauçanno emphasizes the relation of the private man to his work, offering fresh insights into the grand optical arrangement of Cummings's books."--Starred Library Journal Review For nearly half a century, the personal papers, journals and diaries of Edward Estlin Cummings were kept from public view. These documents reveal far more about the inner life of the famous poet and painter than has ever been known. Now, noted biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno presents the first, definitive, revelatory life story of E.E. Cummings (1894Â-1962), an American original. "Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry."--Starred Kirkus Reviews For E.E. Cummings: A Biography, the author had unprecedented access to all of Cummings's papers-anguished diary entries, reflections on consultations with two psychoanalysts, an autobiographical novel, and a carefully prepared manuscript containing more than one hundred blatantly erotic poems. In the words of William Corbett, author of Boston Vermont and Don't Think Look, "E.E. Cummings, Yankee individualist and, rare for an American poet, satirist is here in full. This means warts and all, but Sawyer-Lauçanno has not come to judge. In this readable and absorbing life he has paid Cummings the honor of clear-eyed candor." Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno paints a full and memorable portrait of this extraordinary American poet.
Emily Dickinson by
From the Great Poets series--exquisite small-format collections of classic poetry enhanced by full-color reproductions of period art, and readable, scholarly introductions. 12 full-color illustrations.
Langston Hughes by
This biography concentrates on the Harlem Renaissance and the writer's political activities during the 1930s.
Lives of the Poets by
A dazzling account of the entire history of poetry in the English language -- from the fourteenth century to the present -- by one of the most intelligent and passionate critics in the field. Setting out to write his own homage to Samuel Johnson's legendary Lives of the English Poets of more than two hundred years ago, Michael Schmidt introduces us to the world tradition of poets who have written in English. From the rustic rhythms of Piers Plowman to today's postmodernists, from fifteenth-century Scotland to the contemporary Caribbean, Schmidt explores the lives and creations of more than three hundred poets, discussing their best (and sometimes worst) poems, their triumphs and tragedies, their individual genius. Here is the shared universe and work of so many great poets, including Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Behn, Burns, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, Rossetti, Yeats, Stevens, Lowell, Bishop, Ginsberg, Rich and Heaney, to name but a few. Schmidt also embraces the extraordinary poetry now emerging from Australia, New Zealand, India and other countries, and shows how these varied landscapes and cultures make their contributions to our common language. Tracing the themes and achievements of each poet's work, Schmidt demonstrates with wit and erudition how poets overshadow and inspire one another across the centuries. En route, he champions some unjustly neglected voices and outlines the ways in which history and politics intervene to shape (or sometimes misshape) the poetic imagination. With infectious enthusiasm and avoiding all fashionable jargon, Schmidt speaks unapologetically for a common language -- the language of poetry, which unites people across continents and across the ages. For anyone who has ever been moved by a poem, a rich and important book.
The Penguin Book of Women Poets by 
A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound by
The first truly comprehensive biography of the controversial poet. The compassionate narrative does not flinch before the poet's eccentric personality and later involvement with Fascist ideology, and brings absorbing new detail to his years of incarceration for treason. Exhaustively researched. Carpenter also provides a bibliography of biographical references and notes on sources.
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life by
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death including the publication of her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters . A chronology maps out key events and publications both in Plath's lifetime and posthumously.
eBooks are accessible online, and many are available for download or 2 week check out.
Edgar Allan Poe by
Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators. Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and Marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.
Reconsidering Longfellow by
Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow's work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellow's financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922 by
Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot's poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot's friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot's Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot's poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.
Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets by
What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers by
In 1773, the slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom. The first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in English, she was emancipated by her owners in recognition of her literary achievement. For a time, Wheatley was the most famous black woman in the West. But Thomas Jefferson, unlike his contemporaries Ben Franklin and George Washington, refused to acknowledge her gifts as a writer--a repudiation that eventually inspired generations of black writers to build an extraordinary body of literature in their efforts to prove him wrong. In The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the pivotal roles that Wheatley and Jefferson played in shaping the black literary tradition. Writing with all the lyricism and critical skill that place him at the forefront of American letters, Gates brings to life the characters, debates, and controversy that surrounded Wheatley in her day and ours.
William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture by
Bremen's study examines the development of William Carlos Williams's poetics, focusing in particular on Williams's ongoing fascination with the effects of poetry and prose, and his life-long friendship with Kenneth Burke. Using a framework based on Burke's and Williams's theoretical writings and correspondence, as well as on the work of contemporary cultural critics, Bremen looks closely at how Williams's poetic strategies are intimately tied to his medical practice, incorporating a form of methodological empiricism that extends his diagnoses beyond the individual to include both language and community. The book develops a series of rhetorical, cognitive, medical, and political analogues that clarify the poetic and cultural achievements Williams hoped to realize in his writing.
The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet by
In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass's The North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded. For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.
Baudelaire, Prince of Clouds: A Biography by
A biography of the life of French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire .
Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning by
A Riveting and brilliant work of biography. The story of two great English poets, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose work was immediately recognized and adored by their contemporaries, whose courtship ranks with the great love stories of all time -- and in whose marriage romance was not merely sustained but intensified. We enter their story through the sealed Victorian world of the Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth, at thirty-nine, a poet of international fame, a child prodigy who had grown to be a middle-aged spinster, a woman for whom romantic love seemed not to be possible, confined by illness, morphine, and the tyranny of her father, scion of rich Jamaican slaveholders, rum and sugar traders. It is to this fortress that Robert Browning, already an admired young poet and playwright, already a devotee of Elizabeth's, lays siege. ("I love your verses," he had written Elizabeth in his first letter to her, long before they met. "I love your verses with all my heart -- and I love you too.") And miraculously Elizabeth let life in. Julia Markus chronicles their extraordinary courtship, their marriage in secret (Browning to Elizabeth: "How you have dared and done all this ... for my only sake?"), and their radiant honeymoon in Italy. Markus shows us how the political events of the times inspired the great dramatic monologues of Robert's middle years and how Italy's stormy reunification inspired Elizabeth's later work. We come to see Elizabeth as an artist with a fierce and final confidence in poetry and its effect on the poets' lives. We see husband and wife celebrate the birth of their son, Robert Wiedemann "Pen" Barrett Browning (Browning to her sisters: "I sate by [Elizabeth] as much as I was allowed, and I shall never forget what I saw, tho' I cannot speak about it"). We see them among their artist/writer friends: in London with Tennyson, Thackeray, Rossetti, and others; in Rome with William Story, the American lawyer, poet, sculptor; with Harriet Hosmer, the stonecutter, who was one of the models for Aurora Leigh; with Charlotte Cushman, the American actress, who held readings of Elizabeth's novel in verse. We see Elizabeth in Paris meeting her heroine George Sand, whose society of socialists and theatrical types Robert described as "ragged Red." We come to understand Elizabeth's dependence on the ever-present drug in her life ("I should not be alive except by help of my morphine") and her constant battle with depression. And we see Elizabeth, encouraged by a woman with whom she was infatuated, move from interest to obsession with spiritualism, a cause that became the only source of serious dissension between the Brownings. We follow the course of their rich marriage, from the beginning when each saw the other as a brilliant poet, a compassionate and strangely similar heart, through the years in which they discovered each other's differences, each remaining a complex and thrilling human being to the other. To tell their story, Markus for the first time makes use of much of Elizabeth's unpublished correspondence, amid a wealth of other documents. She delves fully into the Brownings' Creole background and shows how it affected their lives and their work (Elizabeth was the first of the Jamaican Barretts to be born in England in many generations). Brilliantly interweaving the Brownings' own words with her authentic and perceptive narrative, Julia Markus brings these two great poets -- their marriage, their work, their times -- alive as never before.
Dirt and Deity: A Life of Robert Burns by
This biography illuminates and explores the complexities and contradictions of Burns's character and personality, untangling the myth from the legend. Based on new evidence from 700 letters Burns wrote during his life, McIntyre concentrates on the circumstances of the writing of poetry itself, and paints a vivid picture of Burns's emotional and impulsive political views, the cruelty and gentleness of which he was capable, stressing the importance and the quality of the satirical poetry as well as the unforgettable love poetry immediately associated with his name.
Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by
This is the first full-scale biography of Lorca, world-famous poet and playwright, martyr to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and secret homosexual."
Jorge Luis Borges by
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six. This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work. Conducted between 1964 and 1984, the interviews reveal Borges to be a remarkably candid, humorous man, by turns skeptical and enthusiastic, and always a singularly incisive and adventurous thinker. He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity. In depth he examines the meanings and intentions of his own famous stories and poems, and he speaks of the writers whose works he has loved-Dante, Cervantes, Emerson, Dickinson, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Stevenson, Kipling, Whitman, Frost, and Faulkner-and of those whom he disliked, such as Hemingway and Lorca. Borges expresses his contempt for Péron and assesses the tumultuous politics of Argentina. He speaks also of the imagination as a type of dreaming, about issues of collaboration and translation, about philosophy, and about time. Many of the interviews were conducted by notable figures, including Alastair Reid, Willis Barnstone, and Ronald Christ. As Borges speaks in these conversations, readers who have fallen under the spell of his magical prose and poetry will find additional sustenance.
The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography by
W. B. Yeats is widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. This new critical biography seeks to tell the story of his life as it unfolded in the various contexts in which Yeats worked as an artist and as public figure.
Pablo Neruda: Five Decades, Poems,1925-1970 by
This bilingual volume is the definitive collection of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel Prize winner and one of the most profoundly influential poets of the twentieth century. His love poems are earthy and transcendent, and his political poems are the work of a man as incisive, impassioned, and ferociously intelligent as he was sensual. Ben Belitt has drawn the 138 selections in Five Decades from all of Neruda's major works, including the early volumes Residence on Earth, General Song, Elemental Odes, Voyages and Homecomings, Book of Vagaries, A Hundred Love Sonnets, Black Island Memorial, and the later The Hands of Day, World's End, and Skystones.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Youth's Unextinguished Fire by
This biography, incorporating recent research and scholarship, stresses the intimate relationship between Shelley's life (1792-1822) and his poetry. Unusual aristocratic family influences, a unique and precocious childhood, traumatic educational events, and parental rejection molded the concurrent development of his radical sociopolitical beliefs and his poetic identity. Political activism (Ireland and Wales) prefigured the disastrous dissolution of Shelley's first marriage, replaced by involvement with William Godwin and elopement with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. After losing legal custody of his two children by his first wife because of his radical writing and behavior, increasing social ostracism, health concerns, and critical attacks on his poetry led to exile in Italy. Here, before his untimely death, he composed his greatest lyrics and most profound poetry amid personal anguish involving the deaths of his and Mary's children, Keats's death, romantic intrigues, marital disaffection, disillusionment with Byron, and political turbulence at home and abroad. Illustrated, Now retired, Dr. Bieri taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
Pushkin: A Biography by
Pushkin is Russia's greatest and best-loved poet: a romantic, enigmatic figure who, during a brief but turbulent life, changed Russian literature forever with his vital and passionate verse. Many of his works including The Bronze Horseman, The Queen of Spades, and his extraordinary novel in verse, Eugene Onegin have become classics of world literature and are as exhilarating to read today as they were when first published. Now we have the first full biography in sixty years of this literary legend. Born in Moscow in 1799, he was descended on one side from an ancient noble family, on the other from a black African slave of Peter the Great. At the age of twenty he was expelled from St. Petersburg for his satirical writings. He remained in internal exile, under the direct supervision of the emperor, for the next seven years, and throughout his life attracted official disapproval for his political and religious beliefs and for his many love affairs. In 1831, despite mounting debts from gambling and an insecure income, he married the eighteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova, who soon became recognized as one of the most beautiful women of St. Petersburg society. The attentions paid her by a Guards officer, the French émigré Anthès, roused Pushkin to fury. In the subsequent duel, fought on January 27, 1837, he was fatally wounded. He died in agony two days later. This superb, authoritative biography & winner of England's prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize frees the complex figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth, making palpable the poet's rare energy, talents, and spirit. Telling Pushkin's story with exacting scholarship, elegant wit, and acute insight, T. J. Binyon gives us a revelation of the poet and the man.
Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology by
Rabindranath Tagore is revered the world over for the healing power of his luminous words and calming wisdom. Unlike previous Tagore collections, which often focus only on a single genre, Dutta and Robinson's anthology offers the full range of Tagore's talent--a play, poems, songs, a novel, selections from his memoirs, travel writings and essays--all in one graceful volume.
On Seamus Heaney by
A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.
eBooks are accessible online, and many are available for download or 2 week check out.
Early Greek Poets' Lives : The Shaping of the Tradition by
This book examines the formation and development of the biographical traditions about early Greek poets, focusing on the traditions of Hesiod, Stesichorus, Archilochus, Hipponax, Terpander and Sappho. The study provides a detailed overview of the traditions and chorographical material about these poets and seeks to clarify who were the creators of the particular traditions; what were the sources; when the traditions were formed; and to what extent they are shaped by formulaic themes and story-patterns. It challenges several mainstream assumptions on the subject, for example, that the traditions were formed mainly in the Post-Classical period; that the only significant source for the legends is the works of the particular poet; and that the poets were perceived as new heroes.
John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by
This book re-examines scrupulously the writings and the life records of John Milton, in the context of a proper understanding of the recent developments in seventeenth-century historiography. Milton's thought has often been too simply described. The approach here is to interrogate more skeptically notions like puritanism, republicanism, radicalism, and dissent. A more complex story emerges, of Milton's culturally rich but ideologically conformist early decades, and of his radicalization during the later years of Laudianism. We track the internal dynamics of English puritanism in the 1640s and the impact that has on his own convictions. In the 1650s Milton's thought and beliefs were reconciled to the role as public servant. In the 1660s a renewed confidence carried him towards the completion of his greatest project, Paradise Lost, and his final years were ones of creative fulfilment and renewed political engagement. Amid the discontinuities occasioned by shifting political circumstance, by the exigencies of polemical context, and the diversity of genres in which he wrote, Milton emerged as a major political thinker and significant systematic theologian, as well as the most eloquent prose writer and most accomplished poet of the age. A more human Milton appears in these pages, flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning, as well as the literary genius who achieved so much.
The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts by
Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for the non-reading as well as the reading public. Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his 'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.
Mystical Poems of Rumi by
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), legendary Persian Muslim poet, theologian, and mystic, wrote poems acclaimed through the centuries for their powerful spiritual images and provocative content, which often described Rumi's love for God in romantic or erotic terms. His vast body of work includes more than three thousand lyrics and odes. This volume includes four hundred poems selected by renowned Rumi scholar A. J. Arberry, who provides here one of the most comprehensive and adept English translations of this enigmatic genius. Mystical Poems is the definitive resource for anyone seeking an introduction to or an enriched understanding of one of the world's greatest poets. "Rumi is one of the world's greatest lyrical poets in any language--as well as probably the most accessible and approachable representative of Islamic civilization for Western students."--James W. Morris, Oberlin College
A New Life of Dante by
This is the first new biography in English for nearly eighty years of Italy's foremost writer and thinker, and weaves into a single thread the whole of Dante's life and works. Dante is an intensely philosophical writer as well as a socio-political one, and both these intimately connected aspects are kept constantly in view in this extensive discussion of his writings. As well as his masterpiece the Divina Commedia, his other works are also given considerable attention. The aim is to make an account of Dante's life accessible to students and to the curious and intelligent but non-specialist reader. All quotations are fully translated. This new edition has been fully revised and updated, including an updated bibliography.
Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception by
The poet Li Bo (701-762) has long inspired controversy among readers and critics. Known even during his lifetime as the Banished Immortal, he continues to spark imaginations and challenge passionately held convictions about poetic values. In this lucidly and gracefully written volume, Paula Varsano presents the first full-length study of Li Bo in English in half a century and the first extended look at the poet's critical reception. Persuaded that the essence of his poetry lay well beyond the reach of the usual modes of study and description, readers from the ninth to the twentieth century developed a particularly dynamic critical language. Varsano shows how this language answered the need to conceptualize shifting parameters of poetic creativity over hundreds of years. At the same time, she offers an account of Li Bo's entry into the canon and asks how this in turn transformed both the reception of his work and the transmission of his poetic persona. This story of Li Bo's critical reception and canonization is propelled by the malleable and elusive ideal of the ancient. And so, Varsano devotes the second part of her study to the poems themselves, investigating those poetic man
William Blake by
Contents: Boyhood 1757-1771; Apprenticeship and Marriage; Lyrical Poems; Poland Street and the Early Prophecies; Lambeth; Blake's Ideas on Art; Felpham with Hayley; Milton and Jerusalem; London Once More; Disciples and Death; Blake and the Sublime.
