Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

From Catullus to Horace, the tradition of Latin erotic poetry produced works of literature which are still read throughout the world. Ovid’s Amores, written in the first century BC, is arguably the best-known and most popular collection in this tradition. Born in 43 BC, Ovid was educated in Rome...

Faced with the chaos and banality of modern, everyday life, a number of Victorian poets sought innovative ways of writing about the unpoetic present in their verse. Their varied efforts are recognisably akin, not least in their development of mixed verse-forms that fused novel and epic to create something equal to the miscellaneousness of the age.

S. J. Harrison sets out to sketch one answer to a key question in Latin literary history: why did the period c.39-19 BC in Rome produce such a rich range of complex poetical texts, above all in the work of the famous poets Vergil and Horace? Harrison argues that one central aspect of this literary...

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart’s membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many...

Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings...

In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled...

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond - Jack to his family, John in later life - was born in Birkenhead in 1902 and made his living as an advertising copywriter, but his true writing life was in poetry, three volumes of which he published in his lifetime: The Walls of Glass (1934), Voices in a Giant City (1947),...

The love songs of Occitan troubadours inspired a rich body of courtly lyric by poets working in neighboring languages. For Sarah Kay, these poets were nightingales, composing verse that is recognizable yet original. But troubadour poetry also circulated across Europe in a form that is less well known...

Close to the Bone: poetic moments of love and longing is an anthology of poems celebrating love in all its incarnations; be it lovers, friends or family. It takes you on a journey through the author’s rich experience of romance, intimacy, loss, desire, familial ties and that ever-present strive...

This edition of Charlotte Brontë’s poems, first published in 1985, although not "complete", provides a reliable text of all of her available verse, as well as a detailed history of the whereabouts of Charlotte’s manuscripts, the story of their publication over the years, and a commentary of the poetry itself. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature.

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound,...

This volume, containing a selection of the poetry and prose of Joseph Howe, presents various aspects of a fascinating man who few Canadian know as other than the 'tribune of Nova Scotia' and a political giant of colonial times. Yet Howe was also a writer, and a good one. His intuitive grasp and pragmatic...

Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney. Stylistic debts to Old...

Once again, Jean Janzen writes mighty poems, finding those heart-stopping human moments for which there is no adequate language. Janzen, a National Endowment for the Arts winner, begins this newest collection of poetry with "Wailing in the Shower" and these arresting stanzas: "After the elation of...