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