Poetry History category: 2770 books

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue – as all the best critics have done – of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident on every page of this collection...

An award-winning poet and teacher demystifies poetry’s most elusive element. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem...

Geoffrey Chaucer, regarded by many as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, whose ‘Canterbury Tales’ helped establish the legitimacy of Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin....

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass. Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and...

Now with an introduction from celebrated poet James Tate, Riding the Earthboy 40 is the only volume of poetry written by acclaimed Native American novelist James Welch. The title of the book refers to the forty acres of Montana land Welch's father once leased from a Blackfeet family called Earthboy....

Fragments of wisdom from the ancient world In the sixth century b.c.-twenty-five hundred years before Einstein-Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becomes energy in flux, in relativity. His great book, On Nature, the world's first coherent philosophical...

This extraordinary collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative woman's life from the 1950s onward. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in...

A dazzling short assessment of the life and work of the poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Among Heaney’s many published collections are ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘North’, ‘Field Work’, ‘Station Island’ and ‘Spirit Level’ (May 1996), which was that rarest...

The poems of Kevin Hart have nurtured international poetry audiences for nearly four decades. Translations of Hart’s work have appeared in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Vietnamese, among other languages, and bear witness to the growing interest in Hart’s poetry both in the United...

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance...

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Hölderlin, Verlaine, George, Mörike, and Yeats in detail, Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. This study delves into the irresolvable conflict between a poem's guise as quasi-architectural stasis and quasi-musical kinesis.

The Road to Inver gathers the verse translations of Tom Paulin from four decades, and brings together distinguished versions of classical and European poets which have appeared in his previous collections, from Liberty Tree (1983) to The Wind Dog (1999). But The Road to Inver also includes dozens...

Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives – ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic – the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized...

The poems in Adam Thorpe's latest collection are concerned with the continuum between two worlds: the lived present and the felt past. With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil...