Poetry History category: 2770 books

Heroic poetry was central to the construction of Anglo-Saxon values, beliefs, and community identity and its subject matter is often analyzed as a window into Anglo-Saxon life. However, these poems are works of art as well as vehicles for ideology. Aesthetics of Nostalgia reads Anglo-Saxon historical...

Quo Anima studies the poetry of contemporary women poets in relation to spirituality and innovative form. In the past two decades, a lively conversation has taken shape as more and more poets have risked engagement with various forms of mysticism. However, much of the critical response to this work...

This early work by Stephen Vincent Benét was originally published in 1918 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Young Adventure, a Book of Poems' is a collection of poetry, including 'Young Blood', 'The Quality of Courage', 'Lonely Burial', and many more. Stephen...

Sylvia Plath is one of the best-known and most widely-studied writers of the twentieth century. Since her death in 1963, critics have presented different images of Plath: the 'suicidal' poet, the frustrated wife and mother, the feminist precursor.In this lively and approachable introduction to the author's...

The work consists of eleven dialogues, between a teacher and her students, aged between 16 and 18. The subtitle, Per Carmen, has a double meaning: Carmen is the name of one of the students, who died young; in Latin, per carmen means through poetry, which on one hand is the vehicle and, on the other,...

In the earliest extant works of Greek literature, Zeus reigns supreme in the Olympian hierarchy. However, scattered and scanty though they may be, there are allusions to threats of rebellion which challenge Zeus' supremacy. This book examines these passages, drawn from Homer, Hesiod and the "Homeric...

Andrew Marvell, Sexual Orientation, and Seventeenth-Century Poetry examines the important Interregnum/Restoration poet Andrew Marvell against a background of his contemporary lyric poets. His major works from the early elegies to the later political pieces are discussed with a view to unmasking the...

This collection of poems and essays by both poets and scholars explores how John Donne’s writing has entered into the language, the imagination, and the navigation of erotic and spiritual desires and experiences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. The chapters chart a winding path from...

This book is the first volume in a collective edition, the plan of which includes all the surviving records of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The main body of Anglo-Saxon poetry as it has come down to us is contained in four important miscellany manuscripts, the Junius Manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter...

Wallace Stevens dedicated his poetry to challenging traditional notions about reality, truth, knowledge, and the role of language as a means of representation. Rosu demonstrates that Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist...

This book gives an insight into panegyrics, a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern Society. Poets in this multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials, and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat.

A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, “is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic...

W. G. Sebald's writing has been widely recognized for its intense, nuanced engagement with the Holocaust, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII, and other episodes of violence throughout history. Through his inventive use of narrative form and juxtaposition of image and text, Sebald's work has offered...

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is one of Italy’s most canonical and beloved poets. In Beyond the Family Romance, Maria Truglio offers fresh insight into the uncanny qualities of Pascoli’s domestic verse. As suggested by the Freudian title, this study opens a dialogue between Pascoli’s literature...