Poetry History category: 2770 books

An indispensable collection of the work of one of the 19th century’s most compelling and original poets, this comprehensive edition contains all of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and three most important essays. Reissued to coincide with the release of a major Hollywood film of the same title, it exposes...

A “superb study” that “reminds us that Williams remains our contemporary not only for the lively cadences and fresh imagery that animate his poems, but for the ethical imperative of his example” (The Sewanee Review).   Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived...

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant...

Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young poets who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment of those days. Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and, despite an active career which embraced schoolmastering , journalism, publishing, academic...

My aim is to take familiar things and make Poetry of them, and do it in such a way That it looks as if it was as easy as could be For anybody to do it . . . the power of making A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much. --from "The Art of Poetry" When David Ferry's translation...

In time for the bimillennium of Ovid's relegation to Tomis on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Jo-Marie Claassen here revises and integrates into a more popular format two decades of scholarship on Ovid's exile. Some twenty articles and reviews from scholarly journals have been shortened,...

Innovative and thorough, Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry presents nine essays that reexamine the literary iconography of Middle English. Chaucer’s work is the most well-known, and possibly the most significant, remnant of the Middle Ages; investigations into his writing and meanings are...

This book focuses on the role of the city, and its processes of mutual transformation, in poetry by experimental women writers. Readings of their work are placed in the context of theories of urban space, while new visions of the contemporary city and its global relationships are drawn from their innovations in language and form.

Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations...

On the Great Atlantic Railway is Kenneth's Koch's inspired collection of 32 years of work. Koch, David Lehman said in The American Poetry Review, is "a masterly innovator . . . who has used his extravagant powers of wit and invention to enlarge the sphere of the poetic . . . he has stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry."

What is patriarchal poetry? How can it be both attractive and tempting and yet be so hegemonic that it is invisible? How does it combine various mixes of masculinity, femininity, effeminacy, and eroticism? At once passionate and dispassionate, Rachel Blau DuPlessis meticulously outlines key moments...

This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially-commissioned...

In Creating the Empress, Vera Proskurina examines the interaction between power and poetry in creating the imperial image of Catherine the Great, providing a detailed analysis of a wide range of Russian literary works from this period, particularly the main Classical myths associated with Catherine (Amazon,...

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.