Poetry History category: 2770 books

This new critical volume offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost's life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet's career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult...

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps across politics, philosophy, and economics.

In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart’s translations and the place and function of translation in Smart’s poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart’s poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern...

On the heels of a renewed global interest in the figure and writing of 19th century British poet John Keats (as attested by Jane Campion’s acclaimed film by the same title), Elido Fazi’s Bright Star retraces the last period of the young poet’s life, as he struggles with financial hardship and...

This title, first published in 1990, is a census of the manuscripts of William Butler Yeats. The census includes not only his books, plays and poetry but also the whereabouts of many of Yeats’s letters and speeches, and will be of particular interest to students of literature. For further...

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates...

Contemporary criticism of Donne has tended to ignore the historical culture and ideology that conditioned his writings, reinforcing the traditionally accepted model of the poet as a humanist of ethical, cultural and political individualism. In this title, first published in 1986, Thomas Docherty challenges...

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance. It is the basic vehicle of Shakespeare's plays and the form in which Milton chose to write Paradise Lost. Milton associated it with freedom, and the Romantics, connecting it in turn with freethinking,...

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.

Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between...

This study of the definition of literature in the late medieval period is based on manuals of writing and on literary commentary and glosses. It defines a method of reading which may now profitably explain medieval texts, and identifies new primary medieval evidence which may ground and guide new...

In The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" (The Times Literary Supplement), presents engaging, rigorous, and insightful explorations of a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Stevie Smith's...

When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to that which had been voiced before. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original...

This selection of works by Wallace Stevens--the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet”--was first published in 1967. Edited by the poet's daughter Holly Stevens, it contains all the major long poems and sequences, and every shorter poem of lasting value in...