Product Description: The book offers an interpretation of a posthumously published poem by Edwin Muir (1887-1959), beginning ''The heart could never speak / But that the Word was spoken.'' The poem is read as summing up Muir's lifelong struggle with fundamental questions about the meaning of existence, questions often developed in dialogue with such figures as Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Kafka...read more

Product Description: Over the last thirty years, more and more critics and scholars have come to recognize the importance of science to literature. 'Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions' is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on what poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of the scientific developments going on around them...read more

Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview.Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s―Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan―and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a "compost" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry.This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.

Product Description: The first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspectiveIn a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, John Milton,William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W...read more

Product Description: What is the soul of poetry? Perhaps the most influential answer comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the writer regarded poetry as an instance of mimesis, a kind of representation or simulation. However, despite the significance he gave the term, Aristotle's use of the word mimesis was far from unequivocal, and over the centuries that have followed this inconsistency has stimulated a wealth of interpretations and debate...read more

Product Description:  In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology...read more

Product Description: A Companion to Poetic Genre brings together over 40 contributions from leading academics to provide critical overviews of poetic genres and their modern adaptations. Covers a large range of poetic cultural traditions from Britain, Ireland, North America, Japan and the Caribbea Summarises many genres from their earliest origins to their most recent renderings The only full-length critical collection to deal with modern adaptations of poetic genres Contributors include Bernard O’Donoghue, Stephen Burt, Jahan Ramazani, and many other notable scholars of poetry and poetics...read more

Product Description: Packed with detailed analysis, this thick, one-volume overview in the Britannica Guide to Literary Elements series is a valuable reference resource about literary forms and important writers. It looks like heavy going, but Kuiper's informal text (Think about it) will encourage many older YAs to read on...read more

Product Description: Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty...read more

Product Description: Praise for Marilyn Hacker: "How piercing the duet we're offered between Marilyn Hacker and the reality principle. Reality saying, it’s impossible, something's always sacrificed: you can't be so merry and so raw; so learned and earthy; so gut-wrenching, so danceable at once...read more

Product Description: This book contains fifteen essays and talks by a poet and librettist who has taught for over forty years (Iowa, Columbia, Bennington, Minnesota). They explore a range of topics, from individual poets such as D.H. Lawrence, John Berryman and James Wright to themes such as "Failure," "Listening," "Poetry and Walking," and "Words for Music...read more

This illustrated reference volume provides substantial critical excerpts and biographical information on poets from all years. Whenever available, comments from the poets themselves and excerpts from interviews are also included.

Product Description: Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones...read more