Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

From archaic Sparta to classical Athens the chorus was a pervasive feature of Greek social and cultural life. Until now, however, its reception in Roman literature and culture has been little appreciated. This book examines how the chorus is reimagined in a brief but crucial period in the history...

What’s the point of poetry? It’s a question asked in classrooms all over the world, but it rarely receives a satisfactory answer. Which is why so many people, who read all kinds of books, never read poetry after leaving school. Exploring twenty-two works from poets as varied as William...

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the oppor-tunity...

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues...

Praise for Lawrence Joseph: "Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry." ---John Ashbery "Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes...

This volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of ‘life’ in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of British Romantic poetic practice and theory....

The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two...

Soldier, spy and poet, Sir Philip Sidney remains an enigmatic figure of the Elizabethan world, whose diverse and inspiring works helped to shape the course of English literature throughout the Renaissance, in spite of his tragic early death. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature’s...

Continuing the success of the Pocket Guide series, Andrew Taylor’s Pocket Guide to Poets and Poetry starts with a history of poetry, setting the poets and their work in the context of their time and the influence of their work including political agenda, festivities and historical celebrations and...

This book retells the story of Irish poetry written in English between the union of Britain and Ireland in 1801 and the early years of the Irish Free State. Through careful poetic and historical analysis, Matthew Campbell offers ways to read that poetry as ruptured, musical, translated and new. The...

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow...

Poetry is the quintessence of Arab culture. In this book, one of the foremost Arab poets reinterprets a rich and ancient heritage. He examines the oral tradition of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, as well as the relationship between Arabic poetry and the Qur'an, and between poetry and thought. Adonis...

Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language...

The entire history of Western poetry is surveyed in this study, from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern period. Two hundred poems extracts are included, and 10 poets are covered in depth, with critical appraisals of their lives and work. Problems of translation...