What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most...

In "Spills," poet, critic and translator, Angela Leighton looks back on her past; from memories of her childhood between northern England and Italy, to her Jewish heritage and relationship with her father, the famous prize-winning composer, Kenneth Leighton. She also contemplates the weighty subjects of death and mortality through candid and honest poems which draw from various classical sources including the Bible and Greek mythology. This collection also contains Leighton's English translations of the work of Sicilian poet and politician Leonardo Sciascia.