Poetry History category: 2770 books

In this book, Eric Falci reshapes the story of Irish poetry since the 1960s. He shows how polemical arguments concerning the role of poetry in 1960s Ireland evolve into a set of formal and compositional strategies for emerging Irish poets in the mid 1970s and beyond. His study presents a cohesive...

The invention of epic poetry corresponds with a definite and, in the history of the world, often recurring state of society. That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself...

Questions of Poetics is Barrett Watten’s major reassessment of the political history, social formation, and literary genealogy of Language writing. A key participant in the emergent bicoastal poetic avant-garde as poet, editor, and publisher, Watten has developed, over three decades of writing in...

A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric...

The chaotic mixture of elements in Trakl's poems is more apparent than real, this book argues, thus challenging the "Orphic" view of Walther Killy and his followers. A dream of unity—one of the most ancient dreams in human history—is in fact reflected in all of Trakl's work. The...

This book offers a new reading of Marcell Mauss’ and Lewis Hyde’s theories of poetry as gift, exploring poetry exchanges within 20th and 21st century communities of poets, publishers, audiences and readers operating along a gift economy.  The text considers trans-Atlantic case studies across...

Basing his contention on two different lines of argument, Michael Bryson posits that John Milton-possibly the most famous 'Christian' poet in English literary history-was, in fact, an atheist. First, based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for...

When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, “What makes a good poem?” Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer. The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of...

Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry...

This book explores contemporary Anglophone Cameroon poetry’s engagement with the environment through an eco-textual analysis of a cross section of poems from different poets. In this regard, the work broadens the field of ecocriticism beyond the original Anglo-American axis by developing a more...

This book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and...

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which the Black Arts Movement’s poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the...

The poet George Oppen comments, “There are situations which cannot honorably [be] met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” To write poetry under such circumstances, he continues, “would be a treason to one’s neighbor.” Committing...

Over the last thirty years, more and more critics and scholars have come to recognize the importance of science to literature. 'Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions' is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on what poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of the...