This is the first collection of scholarly essays on the Homeric Hymns, a corpus of 33 hexameter poems celebrating gods that were probably recited at religious festivals, among other possible performance venues, and were frequently attributed in antiquity to Homer.
'Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us' Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the greatest twentieth-century lyric poets in German.
Passion's Triumph over Reason presents a comprehensive survey of ideas of emotion, appetite, and self-control in English literature and moral thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is displaced from as much as grounded in his native country.
Writing After Sidney examines the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), author of the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and The Defence of Poesy, and the most immediately influential writer of the Elizabethan period.
'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing.
This is a collection of studies on ancient (especially Latin) poetry and historiography, concentrating especially on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of considering the literature to illuminate the historical Roman context and the historical context to illuminate the literature.
The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
`Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died' Like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Iseult, the names of Troilus and Criseyde will always be united: a pair of lovers whose names are inseparable from passion and tragedy.
`Now listen with good will, as I go straight to my subject matter, in which you may hear the double sorrows of Troilus in his love for Criseyde, and how she forsook him before she died' Like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Iseult, the names of Troilus and Criseyde will always be united: a pair of lovers whose names are inseparable from passion and tragedy.
Milton's Paradise Lost, the most eloquent, most intellectually daring, most learned, and most sublime poem in the English language, is a poem about angels.
Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance.
Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry.
'The finest translation in and for our time' (Kevin Crossley-Holland) Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, with its intricate plot of enchantment and betrayal is probably the most skilfully told story in the whole of the English Arthurian cycle.
More than any other English monarch before or since, Queen Elizabeth I used her annual progresses to shape her royal persona and to bolster her popularity and authority.
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism.
No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China.
In God and Mystery in Words David Brown uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launch pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today.