Product Description: "For the sake of contraption (like Frost) and of character (like Robinson), John Burt will do a great deal, and his scope and scansion require a great deal, for his theme is nothing less than the reinvention of heroism (King Mark, Mary of Nazareth, St...read more

Product Description: In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line...read more

John Burt's Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren's poetry than any previous such gartering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling or soaking in the finest of Warren's rich output.With each poem. Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren's final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet's career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A "selected" collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar.Burt showcases some very early verse, such as "The Bird and the Stone" and "Oxford City Wall", the only poem known to derive from Warren's days as a Rhodes scholar. There are also portions from the book-length poems, Brother to Dragons and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Arranged chronologically, the selections run the course from darker, more self-consciously formal poems of the 1920s and early 1930s, including "Kentucky Mountain Farm", "Terror", and the most ambitious poem of Warren's early phase, "The Ballad of Billie Potts"; to a looser style and a fusion of personal and political concerns in the 1950s and 1960s.Warren's late phase yielded more than half of his entire poetic opus. A new stylistic boldness elevates his poems to the sublime from 1968 to 1985, as exemplified in the intense "Island of Summer" sequence, the violence-filled "Natural History", and his most famous poem, "Evening Hawk". In his final working years there surfaces a kind of shadow autobiography in verse as well as a self-doubt that edges at times toward despair --as revealed in Warren's darkest meditation on American history, "Going West" -- before the calmer and more reflective mode of his last volume, which also contains the Hiroshima atom-bombing reconsideration "New Dawn".At the heart of Warren's poetry is a celebration of man's intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life's many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet. (view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

A collection of all of the published poetry of the first Poet Laureate of the United States features collations of all versions of the poems, accompanied by texual and explanatory notes. Winner of the 1998 Jules and Frances Laundry Award. UP. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The poems in John Burt's newest collection aspire to record something of what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity," that ability to endure the limitations of the world--and the folly of one's own desires and ambitions in it--until one arrives, beyond disappointment or defeat, at a kind of lucid and reflective acceptance of experience with all of its shades...read more

Product Description: Biological diversity is as crucial in agriculture as it is in nature, and it is equally important to the economic health of both industrial and nonindustrial societies. This book offers a sweeping assessment of crop diversity and the potential for its preservation...read more