Literary studies: poetry and poets

'we can speak of no greater contest than Olympia' The Greek poet Pindar (c.

First published in 1572, The Lusiads is one of the greatest epic poems of the Renaissance, immortalizing Portugal's voyages of discovery with an unrivalled freshness of observation.

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode.

Hesiod, who lived in Boetia in the late eighth century BC, is one of the oldest known, and possibly the oldest of Greek poets.

This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971).

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Robert Burns and Pastoral is a full-scale reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759-1796), arguably the most original poet writing in the British Isles between Pope and Blake, and the creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry.

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade.

'Rimbaud, the poet of revolt, and the greatest' Albert Camus Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms.

'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.

Eminent Coleridgean scholar John Beer presents a series of biographical investigations exploring Coleridge's life, stage by stage, and reconsidering the intellectual quality of his thinking and poetry through an emphasis on the notion of 'play'.

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.

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.

Beowulf is the longest and finest literary work to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, and one of the world's greatest epic poems.

The Hidden Chorus investigates the relationship between the chorus of Greek tragedy and other types of choral song in Greek society.

Afro-Greeks examines the reception of Classics in the English-speaking Caribbean, from about 1920 to the beginning of the 21st century.

This book is a study of writing processes of six modernist authors: Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf, from the 'golden age of manuscripts'.

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.

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 Wordsworth volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the most comprehensive selection currently available of the poetry and prose of one of the finest poets in the English language.

It hardly needs repeating that Plato defined philosophy partly by contrast with the work of the poets.

This wide-ranging and original book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romanticism.

Milton and the Ineffable offers a comprehensive reassessment of Milton's poetic oeuvre in light of the literary and conceptual problem posed by the poet's attempt to put into words that which is unsayable and beyond representation.

This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form.

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s.

Ovid's extraordinary story of Thebes' founding and bloody unravelling spans two books of his epic poem, the Metamorphoses.

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance.

In Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome Michele Lowrie examines how the Romans conceived of their poetic media.

This collection of essays explores the extensive use of Latin and Greek literary texts in a range of recent poetry written in English.

Aeschylus' Persae, first produced in 472 BC, is the oldest surviving Greek tragedy.

The last decades have seen a lively interest in Roman verse satire, and this collection of essays introduces the reader to the best of modern critical writing on Persius and Juvenal.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'.

William Empson was the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century.

This collection of sixteen articles, written by leading specialists in Classical and English literature, is an important contribution to the critical assessment of Ted Hughes, one of the most popular and controversial English poets of the late 20th century.

In this revisionary study of the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth and their friends during the 'revolutionary decade' David Fairer questions the accepted literary history of the period and the critical vocabulary we use to discuss it.

This book reappraises the work of early-seventeenth-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript.

This edited collection of letters by William Empson (1906-1984), one of the foremost writers and literary critics of the twentieth century, ranges across the entirety of his career.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'.

Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry.

No other ancient poet has had such a hold on the imagination of readers as Ovid.

After a period of neglect, Ovid's elegiac poem on the Roman calendar has been the focus of much recent scholarship.

In this book, J.

George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687) was one of the most scandalous and controversial figures of the Restoration period.

George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687) was one of the most scandalous and controversial figures of the Restoration period.

This book aims to provide the reader of Homer with the traditional knowledge and fluency in Homeric poetry which an original ancient audience would have brought to a performance of this type of narrative.

This is the first scholarly edition of the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg.

'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.

Volume 15 in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning presents poetry Browning wrote in his seventies, his last two volumes: Parleyings (1887) and Asolando (1889).

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.

Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers provides the first published text of the diplomatic and personal papers written, copied, and handled by Spenser during his years of secretarial service and colonial planting in Ireland, 1580-1589.