A revealing look at how the Orpheus myth helped Renaissance writers and thinkers understand the force of eloquenceIn ancient Greek mythology, the lyrical songs of Orpheus charmed the gods, and compelled animals, rocks, and trees to obey his commands.
Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyo captures the power of Saigyo's poetry and this previously overlooked poet's keen insight into the social and political world of medieval Japan.
This exploration of the influence of Mayan hieroglyphics on the great American poet Charles Olson (19101970) is an important document in the history of New World verse.
The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America's most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of Vizenor's related works.
'Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence'Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life, Los Angeles.
Evelyn Waugh's first book: a portrait of one of the greatest artists of the nienteenth century, from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth'Biography, as books about the dead are capriciously catalogued, is still very much in the mode'This is a sparkling account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tragic and mysterious life, telling the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century.
A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographerThe most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence.
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
Drawn from the acclaimed New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles in this concise new reference book provide a complete survey of the poetic history and practice in every major national literature or cultural tradition in the world.
Vladimir Nabokov's famous and brilliant commentary on Pushkin's Eugene OneginWhen Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in 1964, the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokov's witty and exhaustive commentary.
Taking seriously Guillaume Apollinaire's wager that twentieth-century poets would one day "e;mechanize"e; poetry as modern industry has mechanized the world, Carrie Noland explores poetic attempts to redefine the relationship between subjective expression and mechanical reproduction, high art and the world of things.
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
For the second half of his long life, Christopher Logue (1926-2011) - political rebel, inventor of the poster poem, pioneer of poetry and jazz - was at work on a very different project: a rewriting of Homer's Iliad.
Ian Hamilton's last book, published posthumously in 2002, is a typically brilliant revisiting of the concept of Samuel Johnson's classic Lives of the English Poets, wherein Hamilton considers 45 deceased poets of the twentieth century, offering his personal estimation of what claims they will have on posterity and 'against oblivion.
The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur.
The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself.
Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens.
A professional man of letters - critic, editor, biographer - though never a professional poet, Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) referred to his poems as 'miraculous lyrical arrivals', and he bided their time with exemplary patience and humility.
Part of the ALL-NEW LADYBIRD EXPERT SERIES'This accessible illustrated guide is a great introduction to the story, its origins and its enduring legacy' BBC HISTORY- Which is more terrifying - a monster or its mother?
In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era.
Written by a leading authority on William Carlos Williams, this book provides a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to twentieth-century American poetry.
Providing a close examination of Milton's wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts.