Poetry History category: 2770 books

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture discusses cultural products—films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media—to individuate through them the dynamics of memory. The field of analysis is Italian...

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the 'music' of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.

Tom Paulin's first collection since The Road to Inver in 2004, Love's Bonfire sets poems about early life and marriage beside up-to-the minute and minutely registered perceptions of post-settlement Ireland. At the book's centre are delicately inward versions of the contemporary Palestinian poet Walid...

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 volume, The...

In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution. He posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent...

A collection of new and selected essays by the Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Poet Laureate. In addition to being one of America’s most famous and commended poets, Charles Simic is a prolific and talented essayist. The Life of Images brings together his best prose work written over twenty-five...

Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake’s cultural milieu and intellectual background,...

Katharine Towers' second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval's lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems explore the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Towers also shows us what that relationship...

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance...

While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his 'borrowing'...

The inspiration for the title poem of Philip Levine’s A Walk with Tom Jefferson is not the founding father and third president of the United States that most readers would imagine upon hearing the name. Levine’s Tom Jefferson is quite different from his namesake: he is an African American living...

Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries.

Critiquing the politics and dynamics of the transcultural poetics of reading literature, this book demonstrates an ambitious understanding of the concept of the poet across a wide range of traditions – Anglo-American, German, French, Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Bengali, Urdu – and philosophies...

Virgil's "Eclogues" represent the introduction of a new genre, pastoral, to Latin literature. Generic markers of pastoral in the "Eclogues" include not only the representation of the singing and speaking of shepherd characters, but also the learned density of the text itself. Here,...