Death's Jest-Book is the extravagant expression of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality, a surrealising of Renaissance revenge tragedy, alight with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting. Conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, it contains some of the most powerful dramatic blank verse by any of the British Romantics. After early acclaim as a lyric poet and dramatist, Beddoes (1803-49) is only now emerging from a century and a half of neglect. This is the first affordable modern edition to present the Jest-Book in its earliest...

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a prolific, versatile and engaging writer. He outlived many of the poets and essayists of his generation whose reputations overshadowed his, but Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats all owed a debt to his advocacy, as did Tennyson and Browning. A poet of charm and technical skill, and an able translator and playwright, Leigh Hunt excelled as an essayist, literary critic and letter writer. His concern was always, in the words of his son, to 'open more widely the door of the library', to share his literary enthusiasms and extend his readers' tastes. This anthology...

At the beginning of his career Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) wrote vigorous poetry, and plays which in their form and vehement characterisation resemble the later work of Samuel Beckett. This volume includes major works: One-Way Song, and Enemy of the Stars in its two very different versions, as well as other writings that can now be seen as central to the formation of Lewis's work. The plays and poems crackle with ferocious energy, concentrated and brilliant, as Lewis creates a literary equivalent to the visual revolutions of Cubism and Vorticism. He explores how an artist should think and write...

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), essayist, poet, humorist, critic and letter-writer, has an enduring reputation for his early Tales from Shakespeare (1807), written in collaboration with his sister Mary, and his Essays of Elia, first published in the London Magazine. This thematic selection of Lamb's writings - essays, dramatic criticism, verse and letters - not only demonstrates his literary achievements; it forms a self-portrait of the writer: generous, amused, and gregarious, finding imaginative escape from grim circumstances in the teeming life of London and the theatre. The reader is drawn into...

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Poet and novelist, Charlotte Smith emerges her as an important and wrongly neglected figure of the early Romantic movement.

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats, Pound and Eliot acknowledged their debt to him and were influenced by his sense of the city as the essential landscape of modernity. As a poet and critic, in his own right, though, Symons has come into his own in recent years. This selection is taken from the full range of Symons' poetry and prose, revealing an experimental writer exploring art,...

The Canzoniere is among Europe's most influential books of lyrics. The focus of this large collection is Petrarch's lifelong love for the mysterious Laura, but the themes he treats are many and various. Although part of the 14th century world, Petrarch expresses perplexities, uncertainties and hesitancies still understandable at the end of the second millennium.

This selection from the most productive Christian pen of the 19th century is also an introduction to one of its most compelling and troubled minds. John Henry Newman (1801-1891) was a dominant figure in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches. His writings and his human presence in Oxford and elsewhere had an abiding impact on both communions and contribute still to the spirit of ecumenicism.