Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> General

Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as...

When Pier Giorgio Di Cicco first appeared on the Canadian literary scene in the early 1980s, he was immediately recognized as one of the most compelling voices of his generation. The Last Effort of Dreams is the first critical collection on Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and traces the steps of his career from different perspectives. The contributors, fellow poets and academics alike, ponder Di Cicco's poetry in diverse ways: through reminiscence, by taking stock, and by focusing on individual texts and specific themes. What emerges is an intriguing composite picture of Di Cicco's complex...

"Like love, Greek poetry was not for hereafter," writes Eva Stehle, "but shared in the present mirth and laughter of festival, ceremony, and party." Describing how men and women, young and adult, sang or recited in public settings, Stehle treats poetry as an occasion for the performer's self-presentation. She discusses a wide range of pre-Hellenistic poetry, including Sappho's, compares how men and women speak about themselves, and constructs an innovative approach to performance that illuminates gender ideology. After considering the audience and the function of different modes of...

In the Aeneid men, women, gods, and goddesses are characterized by the speeches assigned to them far more than by descriptions of their appearance or behavior. Most of the speeches are highly emotional and individualized, reminding us of the most powerful utterances of Greek tragedy.

Gilbert Highet has analyzed all the speeches in the Aeneid, using statistical techniques as well as more traditional methods of scholarship. He has classified the speeches; identified their models in earlier Greek and Latin literature; analyzed their structure; and discussed their...