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The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott
by M. ThurstonThe hero s descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets - British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins - stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.
Undying: A Love Story
by Michel FaberHow can you say goodbye to the love of your life? In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like to have to say goodbye. All I can do, in what remains of my brief time, is mention, to whoever cares to listen, that a woman once existed, who was kind and beautiful and brave, and I will not forget how the world was altered, beyond recognition, when we met.
Unexhausted Time
by Emily BerryUnexhausted Time inhabits a world of dream and dawn, in which thoughts touch us 'like soft rain', and all the elements are brought closer in.Feelings, messages, symbols, visions . . . Emily Berry's latest collection takes shape in the half-light between the real and the imagined, where everything is lost and yet 'nothing goes away'. Here life's innumerable impressions, moods, seasons and déjà vus collect and disarrange themselves, while a glowing, companionable 'I' travels the mind's landscapes in hope of refuge and transformation amid these displaced moments in time. Whether one reads Unexhausted Time as a long poem to step into or a series of titled and untitled fragments to pick up and cherish, the work is healing and inspiring, always asking how we might harness the power of naming without losing life's 'magic unknownness'. By offering these intangible encounters, Emily Berry more truly presents 'what being alive is'.'Emily Berry has a refreshingly free, not to say incendiary, approach to poetry.' Observer
Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics
by Lisa GoldfarbThe book studies the impact of Stevensian and Valeryan poetics, and symbolist poetics more broadly, on a range of Anglo-American poets in untypical fashion. Pairing poets who are not usually studied in their relation to one another reveals mutuality and dissimilitude. Chapter I looks at Stevens and Valery from the vantage point of the senses as opposed to the more usual lens of their similar cerebral or philosophical temperaments. Although critics have largely and justifiably seen Stevens and Eliot in oppositional terms (Stevens proclaims them dead opposites), Lisa Goldfarb asks what happens when we look at them from the vantage point of their mutual interest in creating a musical poetics. Auden is principally known for his distaste for the symbolists and their magical poetics, yet he reserves special praise for Valery and considers him as his poetic mentor; Chapter III studies their poetics side-by-side. With Stevens and Audens mutual appreciation of Valery as a starting point, Chapter IV turns to a closer comparative study of Auden and Stevens, two poets who have traditionally been seen as operating in distinct poetic spheres. While Elizabeth Bishop famously eludes categorization in terms of poetic school or affiliation, a fifth chapter addresses her poetic music in relation to French symbolist poetics, one of the many poetic schools she admired. A sixth and final chapter examines Stevens musical legacy, in large part derived from the symbolists, and addresses the work of a range of modern and contemporary poets, with a final section devoted to the work of contemporary poet, Susan Howe.
Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics
by Lisa GoldfarbThe book studies the impact of Stevensian and Valeryan poetics, and symbolist poetics more broadly, on a range of Anglo-American poets in untypical fashion. Pairing poets who are not usually studied in their relation to one another reveals mutuality and dissimilitude. Chapter I looks at Stevens and Valery from the vantage point of the senses as opposed to the more usual lens of their similar cerebral or philosophical temperaments. Although critics have largely and justifiably seen Stevens and Eliot in oppositional terms (Stevens proclaims them dead opposites), Lisa Goldfarb asks what happens when we look at them from the vantage point of their mutual interest in creating a musical poetics. Auden is principally known for his distaste for the symbolists and their magical poetics, yet he reserves special praise for Valery and considers him as his poetic mentor; Chapter III studies their poetics side-by-side. With Stevens and Audens mutual appreciation of Valery as a starting point, Chapter IV turns to a closer comparative study of Auden and Stevens, two poets who have traditionally been seen as operating in distinct poetic spheres. While Elizabeth Bishop famously eludes categorization in terms of poetic school or affiliation, a fifth chapter addresses her poetic music in relation to French symbolist poetics, one of the many poetic schools she admired. A sixth and final chapter examines Stevens musical legacy, in large part derived from the symbolists, and addresses the work of a range of modern and contemporary poets, with a final section devoted to the work of contemporary poet, Susan Howe.
Unexpected Vanilla
by Hyemi LeeLee Hyemi's poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means. Unexpected Vanilla's exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be nonsexual: drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover's sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular "vanilla" norm without denying its pleasures. Detailing various intimacies in her "world of the second person," which still feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language's scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in female sexuality.
Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism
by J. RobinsonThis book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.
Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century
by Rowena Kennedy-EpsteinIn Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913–1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts—works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.
The Unfolding of The Seasons: A Study of James Thomson's Poem (Routledge Revivals)
by Ralph CohenFirst published in 1970, The Unfolding of The Seasons provides an interpretation and evaluation of James Thomson’s poem The Seasons. Professor Cohen urges its reconsideration as a major Augustan poem, arguing that Thomson’s unity, diction and thought combine with a conception of man, nature and God which is poetically tenable and distinctive. The case for The Seasons as an important work of art depends upon its effectiveness as a moving vision of human experience, and Professor Cohen believes that many critics have not felt this effectiveness because they have misconceived Thomson’s vision and misunderstood his idiom. His study aims to persuade them to return to the poem and to examine it within the context of an Augustan tradition. Professor Cohen shows that Thomson’s great achievement is to have fashioned a conception which, by bringing nature to the forefront of his poem, became a new poetic way of defining human experience. Thomson was not the first nature poet in English, but he was the first to provide an effective idiom in which science, orthodox religion, natural description, and classical allusions blended to describe the glory, baseness and uncertainty of man’s earthly environment, holding forth the hope of heavenly love and wisdom. This study shows that Thomson found a personal idiom by means of which he created an artistic vision. It will appeal to those with an interest in English literature and in philosophy.
The Unfolding of The Seasons: A Study of James Thomson's Poem (Routledge Revivals)
by Ralph CohenFirst published in 1970, The Unfolding of The Seasons provides an interpretation and evaluation of James Thomson’s poem The Seasons. Professor Cohen urges its reconsideration as a major Augustan poem, arguing that Thomson’s unity, diction and thought combine with a conception of man, nature and God which is poetically tenable and distinctive. The case for The Seasons as an important work of art depends upon its effectiveness as a moving vision of human experience, and Professor Cohen believes that many critics have not felt this effectiveness because they have misconceived Thomson’s vision and misunderstood his idiom. His study aims to persuade them to return to the poem and to examine it within the context of an Augustan tradition. Professor Cohen shows that Thomson’s great achievement is to have fashioned a conception which, by bringing nature to the forefront of his poem, became a new poetic way of defining human experience. Thomson was not the first nature poet in English, but he was the first to provide an effective idiom in which science, orthodox religion, natural description, and classical allusions blended to describe the glory, baseness and uncertainty of man’s earthly environment, holding forth the hope of heavenly love and wisdom. This study shows that Thomson found a personal idiom by means of which he created an artistic vision. It will appeal to those with an interest in English literature and in philosophy.
Unheard Voices: An Anthology of Stories and Poems to Commemorate the Bicentenary Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade
by Malorie BlackmanIn March 1807, the British Parliament passed an Act making the trading and transportation of slaves illegal. It was many years before slavery, as it was known then, was abolished, and slavery still continues today in different ways, but it was a big step forward towards the empancipation of a people. Malorie Blackman has drawn together some of the finest of today's writers and poets to contribute to this important anthology. Their short stories and poems sit alongside first-hand accounts of slavery from freed slaves, making a fascinating and absorbing collection that remembers and commemorates one of the most brutal and long-lasting inflictions of misery that human beings have inflicted upon other human beings.
Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film
by M. MenonUnhistorical Shakespeare argues against the ideas of difference that underpin historicist studies of the past and its desires, offering, instead, the idea of homo-history to engage with issues of narcissism, anachronism, and recursiveness in conjunction with sexual desire.
The Universal Home Doctor
by Simon ArmitageAs the title implies, Simon Armitage's flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. Vivid and engaged, the poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against the ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body. Equally, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness and the idea of home.
Universalist Hopes in India and Europe: The Worlds of Rabindranath Tagore and Srečko Kosovel
by Ana JelnikarIn 1913, Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature. World famous overnight, he was translated into numerous languages. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, a young, still anonymous poet felt strongly drawn to the newly available works of the Indian bard. This young man was Srečko Kosovel, who is today hailed as Slovenia’s leading avant-garde poet of the interwar period. But what could Kosovel, then barely out of his teens, have in common with a figure of Tagore’s stature? Deeply affected by Italy’s conquest of parts of Slovene-populated territory, Kosovel was able to identify with Tagore and relate to the historical predicament of colonial subjugation. Despite coming from different backgrounds, they were kindred spirits a dynamic, creative ideal of universalism lay at the core of their concerns. As a ‘true’ universalist, in the sense of feeling empathy with the less fortunate, it was more in the spirit of equality that Kosovel approached Tagore. This volume is the first comparative study of the writings of these two poets who lived worlds apart but spoke in strikingly similar voices. It explores the links between India and East-Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century and gives expression to responses from within Europe that have largely been overlooked in postcolonial and cultural studies.
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
by Maria PopovaIn this book of illustrated essays, Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, presents a celebration of the human search for truth and beauty through the lenses of science and poetry. Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply." In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the resilience of trees and the intelligence of octopuses, Popova tells the stories of scientific searching and discovery. These stories are interwoven with details from the very real and human lives of scientists—many of them women, many underrecognized—and poets inspired by the same questions and the beauty they reveal. Each essay is paired with a poem reflecting its subject by poets ranging from Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, and Tracy K. Smith, and is stunningly illustrated by celebrated artist Ofra Amit. Together, they wake us to a "reality aglow with wonder."
Unlikely Designs (Phoenix Poets)
by Katie WillinghamA collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits—well, I mean, sorry, yes—prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.
Unlikely Designs (Phoenix Poets)
by Katie WillinghamA collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits—well, I mean, sorry, yes—prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.
Unlikely Designs (Phoenix Poets)
by Katie WillinghamA collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits—well, I mean, sorry, yes—prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.
Unlikely Designs (Phoenix Poets)
by Katie WillinghamA collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits—well, I mean, sorry, yes—prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.
Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
by Marjorie PerloffWhat is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and 90s. Perloff traces this poetics of "unoriginal genius" from its paradigmatic work, Benjamin’s encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, both movements now understood as precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein’s opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe’s documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Perloff also finds that the new syncretism extends to language: for example, to the French-Norwegian Caroline Bergvall writing in English and the Japanese Yoko Tawada, in German. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist book Traffic—a seemingly "pure’" radio transcript of one holiday weekend’s worth of traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff shows us "poetry by other means" of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.
The Unpublished Letters of Henry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke Vol 2
by Adrian Lashmore-Davies Mark GoldieHenry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) enjoyed varied political and literary careers. This five-volume edition draws together his letters. It includes a general introduction, headnotes, biographical index and a consolidated index. It is suitable for historians and literary scholars working in the eighteenth century.
The Unpublished Letters of Henry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke Vol 2
by Adrian Lashmore-Davies Mark GoldieHenry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) enjoyed varied political and literary careers. This five-volume edition draws together his letters. It includes a general introduction, headnotes, biographical index and a consolidated index. It is suitable for historians and literary scholars working in the eighteenth century.
The Unpublished Letters of Henry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke Vol 4
by Adrian Lashmore-Davies Mark GoldieHenry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) enjoyed varied political and literary careers. This five-volume edition draws together his letters. It includes a general introduction, headnotes, biographical index and a consolidated index. It is suitable for historians and literary scholars working in the eighteenth century.