Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

The book is the first study of the 10th century Iraqi poet Ibn al-Hajjaj who popularized a new genre of obscene and scatological parody (sukhf) and is considered the most obscene poet in Arabic literature. Antoon traces the genealogy of this fascinating genre in and examines its rise by placing it in its sociopolitical context.

Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that 'poetry makes nothing happen')...

Throughout nearly sixty-five of writing, Pound specialized on the suffocating effects of time on poetry, aesthetic form, and history. Harmon examines Pound's strategies for dealing with time and arrives at a persuasive reading of Pound's works in general and of the The Cantos in particular. By concentrating...

In this study, first published in 1951, the author examines the poetry of Yeats’s last years, that poetry which reached and held to the ‘intensity’ which he had striven for all his life. Vivienne Koch explores the ways in which the great but troubled poems derive their energy from suffering,...

This creative yet scholarly book discusses prose's important relationship to close literary analysis, showing how such an approach can be beneficial for readers, scholars, and writers alike. Bringing together a literary history that consists of writers such as Lermontov, Chekhov, Camus, and Calvino,...

First published in 1990, this title provides a compendium of useful information for any reader of Donne to have at hand: crucial biographical material, historical contextualisation, and details about his life’s work. The intention throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without...

The study of language was central to the thinking of Tennyson and his circle of friends. The period of his education was a time of interest in the subject, as a new form of philology became widely known and accepted in Britain. In this study, Donald S. Hair discusses Tennyson’s own view of language,...

Pinter’s World: Pinter and Company is not a full-scale biography but a series of illuminating chapters about Pinter’s life, character, and thought, employing new information found in his “Appointment Diaries,” recent biographical sources such as Simon Gray’s memoirs, and Henry Woolf’s...

Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ has long commanded the spotlight. Beastly Blake shifts focus to the non-human creatures who populate Blake’s poetry and designs. The author of ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’ was equally struck by the ‘beastliness’ and the beauty of the animal kingdom, the...

Once celebrated as 'the English Sappho,' Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, a professional writer, a formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s.

H**ow t**o L**ive, What t**o Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending...

This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental...

This volume examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico García Lorca. In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader André Breton, Lorca’s surrealist impulse...

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays’ analysis of Coleridge’s poetry, following Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal...