Poetry History Criticism category: 2222 books

W.H. Davies (1871–1940) was popularly though reductively known as the 'tramp-poet' due to his remarkable journey from vagrancy, in Britain and the United States, to considerable literary success. 'Discovered' in part by Edward Thomas, who admired his poetry, Davies became a prolific memoirist and...

The inimitable Alan Bennett selects and comments upon six favorite poets and the pleasures of their works   In this candid, thoroughly engaging book, Alan Bennett creates a unique anthology of works by six well-loved poets. Freely admitting his own youthful bafflement with poetry, Bennett reassures...

Susan Howe's classic groundbreaking exploration of early American literature. In this classic, groundbreaking exploration of early American literature, Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author...

From Plato’s dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant’s relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that philosophers consider taste as an inferior...

T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in...

Illuminating the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognized as central to modern poetry in English, this record is a celebration of the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice’s writing. With contributions by fellow poets and critics—such as Neil Corcoran, Paul...

'That Montague is a significant poet does not need proving. These essays show that he is almost equally formidable as an autobiographer and critic.' - Robert Greacen, Irish Independent The Figure in the Cave selects the prose of one of Ireland's foremost contemporary poets - part autobiography, part...

2013 marks Dannie Abse's 90th birthday. In his lifetime he has published an astonishing array of work including poetry, fiction, criticism, plays and autobiography but it is as a poet that he is best known and loved. In Speak, Old Parrot he returns to themes of loss, love, medicine and its...

Key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore include its frequently intensely political aspect and it preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (“new songs”),...

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential...

Octavio Paz has long been known for his brilliant essays as well as for his poetry. Through the essays, he has sought to confront the tensions inherent in the conflict between art and society and to achieve a unity of their polarities. The Siren and the Seashell is a collection of Paz’s essays, focusing...

While Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was above all a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his...

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century Introduces students to figures including Philip...

The presumption of a deep link between Rilke's art and the fount of psychology can draw upon biographicalas well as theoretical and textualevidence. Rilke's life and work were, from the beginning, ineluctably entwined with intellectual historical developments that signaled the surfacing of psyche, the...