Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Medieval

A verse translation of the first great narrative poem in the English language that captures the feeling and tone of the original.

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands...

Poetry has the power to move and challenge the reader. It can intensify or even celebrate misery, be cynical or wry, or just laugh outright in an outrageous way. Poetry is as serious and antic as life, and yet reading modern poetry can be shocking to our sense of what language is or must be.

In A Grain of Poetry, Herbert Kohl presents a series of guideposts to help everyone read poetry and discover those poems that inform and inspire them. In clear, direct language, he covers all of the essential-but often unchartedpaths to understanding poetry: form and structure, line breaks and...

A New Year s feast at King Arthur s court is interrupted by the appearance of a gigantic Green Knight, resplendent on horseback. He challenges any one of Arthur s men to behead him, provided that if he survives he can return the blow a year later. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and decapitates the knight but the mysterious warrior cheats death and vanishes, bearing his head with him. The following winter Gawain sets out to find the Knight in the wild Northern lands and to keep his side of the bargain....

Cold missiles and a rain
of embers accompany the men
who slide like shadows into the city
faces mud-smeared
stones for teeth no eyes

who slit the throats of everyone
they encounter until breaking down
my door they drag me into the darkness...

William Langland's Piers Plowman is one of the major poetic monuments of medieval England and of world literature. Probably composed between 1372 and 1389, the poem survives in three distinct versions. It is known to modern readers largely through the middle of the three, the so-called B-text. Now, George Economou's verse translation of the poet's third version makes available for the first time in modern English the final revision of a work that many have regarded as the greatest Christian poem in our language.

Langland's remarkable powers of invention and his passionate...

"A remarkably accessible account of individual tales, tellers, and the poem-as-a-whole, with a voice of such authority and appreciative command that it could be recommended to any undergraduate or graduate student. . . . To anyone who doubted the survival of practical criticism in the current sea of theory, this book will come as a tonic."--Dolores Warwick Frese, University of Notre Dame

Arguing from the evidence of extant manuscripts, Edward Condren describes the overall design of the Canterbury Tales--one of the most enigmatic puzzles in Chaucer studies--as a structural...

"This is a book that a Chaucer teacher would want to purchase, and that would be recommended for purchase to one's class of graduate or upper undergraduate students. . . . Fully conversant with sophisticated modern theory of open form as well as medieval rhetorical theory and practice; . . . shows Chaucer's living relation to a whole body of writing, medieval and modern; and . . . does so in a manner that is immediately accessible and highly refreshing."--Derek Pearsall, Harvard University

Rosemarie McGerr examines the open-endedness of Chaucer's narrative poems in relation to modern...

This book brings into print editions, translations, and commentaries for more than two dozen unique poems (in Latin) from the late eleventh and early twelfth century, preserved in Houghton Library's anthology known as MS Lat 300. This book offers unparalleled access to the anthology, previously unavailable in English.

From a literary point of view, those interested in lyric poetry composed in Old French and Old Provençal have paid increasing attention to Latin poetry that circulated in France, and of course those wishing to trace the background of the...