This book by a leading poet is a study of the way that people other than their authors contribute to poems. Discussing work by Wordsworth, Browning, Hardy, Pound, Eliot, Montale, Auden, Lowell, and Hill, Robinson explores how other people's lives and wider circumstances can influence the textual contexts of poems and be felt within the works themselves.

Poetry, Poets, Readers is a defense of poetry against the protective moves which claim that poets never lie because they never affirm, or that their poems exist in a separate "world." Through detailed considerations of poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Muldoon, along with sustained meditations on the role of fact in fictions, the nature of literary value, speech acts and performative utterances issued by poets, the book sets out a fresh model for relationships between poetry, poets, and readers.

Twentieth-Century Poetry presents detailed studies of the pressures and processes involved when twentieth-century poets have composed poems. It not only deals with the forces working upon them, but also the aesthetic, political, and human pressures that they may deploy when negotiating with these forces.

This ground-breaking book explores the experiences of gay men and their understanding of what itmeant to be gay in the20th Century: from when homosexuality was illegal though the less repressed but no less difficult eras of gay liberationand the HIV-AIDS epidemic."