Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Poetry

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron's notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen "from Kentish town to Pisa." From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in order to supply his countrymen with a text that he could then rewrite and confute.

After the...

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain. No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Ruben Dario's recourse to literary paternity and...

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff's excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward's most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers.

Reading Seward's writing alongside recent scholarship on...

This book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens' poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as...

No European Devil can claim so long or so political a connection with Russian culture as Milton's Satan. Russian poets came to know him before they heard of Dante, Marlowe, Tasso, or of the devils of the Baroque era. This may explain why Milton's influence was so intensely felt by the Russians, especially during the Romantic age. In this, the first study in any language of Milton's reception in Russia, that influence is traced to an early translation of Paradise Lostuncovered by Valentin Boss in the Moscow archives.

British radicals who professed to believe that Milton...

Shelley thought all didactic poetry an 'abhorrence, ' and most of the Romantics agreed with this judgment. Critics in this century have been less dismissive of the genre, but seem puzzled by it. There has been a tendency to treat a didactic poem as though it were a kind of lyric, in which the focus of interest lies in the emotions and feelings of the writer. But didactic poetry has a purpose, history, and character of its own. This original and important book asks the question, 'What can the practising critic usefully say about a didactic poem?'

This is not primarily a book about...

During the Second World War, a number of young Canadian poets converged on Montreal and, in a few years of little-magazine and small-press publication, rewrote the story of modern English-Canadian poetry. The Montreal Forties establishes a new reading of Canadian modernist poetry in this crucial decade, during which the radical impersonality of high-modernist poetics gave way to an ironic expression of the modern individual in years of unexampled geopolitical and private crisis.

The book discusses four major English-Canadian poets of the forties; P.K. Page, A.M. Klein,...

A repackaged edition of the revered author's set of dueling critical essays with fellow scholar E. M. W. Tillyard in which they debate the role of an author's biography in the critical appraisal of literature.

C. S. Lewis--the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics--challenges fellow scholar E. M. W. Tillyard on one of the most intriguing questions involving writers and writing. Is a work of...