Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

Reframing Yeats, the first critical study of its kind, traces the historical development of W. B. Yeats's writings across the genres, examining his poetry, autobiographical writings, criticism, and drama with the same critical analysis. While existing studies of Yeats's work choose between...

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied...

Throughout the history of Thomas’s critical reception, psychoanalytic interpretations have been applied that have privileged the psychosexual over the psycho-linguistic elements of his work. The wealth of sexual and pseudo-sexual imagery has acquired a negative charge, and has been used to evidence...

John Milton, whose epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’ is widely regarded as the greatest exemplar of its form in the English language, created a body of poetry and prose that reflected his strong personal convictions and passion for freedom during the political turmoil of his day. The Delphi Poets Series...

Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the English language, Edmund Spenser is famous for ‘The Faerie Queene’, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty. Spenser’s verse was notable for its premier craftsmanship and lyrical beauty, while his poetic innovations,...

A cultural “biography” of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so...

The Cambridge Companion to American Poets brings together thirty-one essays on some fifty-four American poets, spanning nearly 400 years, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance,...

Is there such a thing as Los Angeles poetry? How do we assess a poem about a city as elusive of identity as Los Angeles? What features do poems about this unique urban landscape of diverse peoples and terrains have in common? Poetry Los Angeles is the first book to gather and analyze poems about...

A dazzling short assessment of the life and work of the poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Among Heaney’s many published collections are ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘North’, ‘Field Work’, ‘Station Island’ and ‘Spirit Level’ (May 1996), which was that rarest...

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance...

Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture, captured here in Crediting Poetry, is a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and "world-sorrow." Beginning with the "creaturely existence" of his childhood in...

James Arbuckle (c.1700–1742), poet and essayist, was born in Belfast to a Presbyterian merchant family of Scottish origin and educated at Glasgow University (1717–1723). In Glasgow, his poetry, influenced by Pope and the Latin classics, won praise from leading members of Scotland’s literary...

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through...

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts...