Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

During the U.S. Civil War, a combination of innovative technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news media into a central cultural force. Reacting to the dramatic increases in news reportage and circulation, poets responded to an urgent need to make their work immediately...

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war,...

This book is about reading and studying poetry. Using fully-worked examples and complete poems wherever possible, it shows all the key elements of poetry ‘at work’ in poems

First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and...

Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797–1869), popularly, Ghalib, is the most influential poet of the Urdu language. He is noted for the ghazals he wrote during his lifetime, which have since been interpreted and sung by different people in myriad ways. Ghalib’s popularity has today extended beyond the Indian...

A sweeping intellectual history of the relationship between literary translation, authoritarian politics, linguistic ideologies, juristic philology, religion, and poetry in late nineteenth-century Colombia.

William Blake (1757–1827) is one of the most significant figures in the history of English poetry. He is also one of the most mysterious, most challenging, and most frequently misunderstood. His Songs of Innocence and of Experience, on the surface so simple, are laden with mysteries that seem to...

The importance of typology in the study of early modern literature has long been accepted, yet students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. First published in 1980, this study demonstrates how biblical typology, an apparently arcane interpretative mode, had profound effects on the...

Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's poems on Apollo, Yisrael Levin calls for a re-examination of the poet's place in Victorian studies in light of his contributions to nineteenth-century intellectual history. Swinburne's Apollonian poetry, Levin argues, shows the poet's active participation in...

Tennyson shared the assumptions of his age concerning the value of family life, and treated the domestic as the source of the heroic in both action and character. This book provides a critical examination of these major Victorian themes as they appear in Tennyson's poetry and demonstrates how...

As one of the formative periods in Canadian history, the late nineteenth century witnessed the birth of a nation, a people, and a literature. In this study of Canada's first 'school' of poets, D.M.R. Bentley combines archival work, including extensive research in periodicals and newspapers, with close...

This book examines the literary impact of famed British poet, Barry MacSweeney, who worked at the forefront of poetic discovery in post-war Britain.  Agitated equally by politics and the possibilities of artistic experimentation, Barry MacSweeney was ridiculed in the press, his literary reputation...

Constituent and Pattern in Poetry is a collection of essays on literature and language. It is built on the assumption that works of literature have existence in the real world and that they may be analyzed in a fashion that is not totally subjective. Using models derived from structural linguistics,...

A critical reassessment of the life’s work of a major American poet.   With his suicide in 1932, Hart Crane left behind a small body of work—White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Yet, Crane’s poetry was championed and debated publicly by many of the most eminent literary...