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Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley

John Kinsella

Niall Lucy (ed.)

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, ... More

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, Kinsella is also a prominent activist. In this book the vegan anarchist pacifist poet claims that poetry can act as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills, in particular ecological damage and abuse. Kinsella builds on his earlier notion of ‘linguistic disobedience’ evolving out of civil disobedience, and critiques the figurative qualities of his poems in a context of resistance. The book includes explorations of anarchism, veganism, pacifism and ecological poetics. For Kinsella all poetry is political and can be a call to action.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

Ross Hair

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan ... More

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.Less

Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland

Greg Thomas

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary ... More

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.Less

The Common Spring: Essays on Latin and English Poetry

Niall Rudd

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number ... More

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number of unpublished pieces. It contains essays on Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, which are intended for the reader with a genuine but not necessarily specialised interest in Latin poetry. Corresponding papers on English poets, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift and Tennyson, emphasise the debt owed to their Roman predecessors. Two more general pieces, on the poetry of romantic love and on classical humanism, further underline the continuity between past and present. It is a collection of essays written over a period of time (1996-2000), some previously published, but collected here for the first time with some new piecesLess

Don Paterson

Ben Wilkinson

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s ... More

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, negotiating the postmodern demands of the age in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Alongside the poet’s insistence on poetry as a mode of knowledge, the study argues that Paterson’s originality as a poet is evidenced by his rejection of an idiosyncratic poetic voice, seeking instead to refine a stylistic adaptability. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Less

Edward Dowden: A Critical Edition of the Complete Poetry

Wayne Chapman (ed.)

This edition makes available the complete poetic works of Irish poet Edward Dowden, whose writings were influential at the turn of the twentieth century. With the addition of “Miscellaneous Poems of ... More

This edition makes available the complete poetic works of Irish poet Edward Dowden, whose writings were influential at the turn of the twentieth century. With the addition of “Miscellaneous Poems of Later Dates” in 1914, Mrs. Dowden preserved the order of her husband's early work but imposed a partly chronological arrangement on that and future editions of his verse. She was ambitious to revive Dowden's reputation as a poet. The present edition is quasi-chronological: being strictly chronological in a tripartite divisional arrangement (“from Poems,” “Miscellaneous Poems of Later Dates,” and “A Woman's Reliquary”) followed by a short section entitled “Uncollected Verses,” while maintaining sequences the poet designed. The division of “Uncollected Verses” is chronological according to the dates of publication, and this section is small because Mrs. Dowden had laid her hands on almost all of the already published poetry, save for that of a more ephemeral nature.Less

Edward Lear

James Williams

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most ... More

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, “one of the most popular poets who ever lived”; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. This book, the first full length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. It approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, it connects Lear’s nonsense poetry with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.Less

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric

Edward Allen (ed.)

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to ... More

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial dimension of the evolving history of lyric.Less

Frank O'Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet

Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds)

Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The ... More

Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.Less

A Gallery to Play to: The Story of the Mersey Poets

Phil Bowen

This book is an intimate account of the lives and careers of the so-called Mersey Poets – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten – with unparalleled access to whom, the author has written an ... More

This book is an intimate account of the lives and careers of the so-called Mersey Poets – Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten – with unparalleled access to whom, the author has written an indispensable book for anyone interested in poetry, popular culture, and society over the last forty years.Less

Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography

Hazel Smith

Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, and lunch hours: it is also an ... More

Frank O'Hara's poetry evokes a specific era and location: New York in the fifties and early sixties. This is a pre-computer age of typewritten manuscripts, small shops, and lunch hours: it is also an age of gay repression, accelerating consumerism, and race riots. The author suggests that the location and dislocation of the cityscape creates ‘hyperscapes’ in the poetry of O'Hara. The hyperscape is a postmodern site characterised by difference, breaking down unified concepts of text, city, subject, and art, and remolding them into new textual, subjective, and political spaces. This book theorises the process of disruption and re-figuration that constitutes the hyperscape, and celebrates its radicality.Less

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf

Ann Martin and Kathryn Holland (eds)

This book comprises thirty-five chapters selected from papers delivered at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. Chapters link inter- ... More

This book comprises thirty-five chapters selected from papers delivered at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan. Chapters link inter- and multidisciplinary scholarship to the intellectual and creative projects of Woolf and her modernist peers. Text that identifies and extends points of contact between literary studies and varied disciplines are arranged in four thematic sections covering history, materiality, and multiplicity; patterns, practices, and principles; art, influence, and embodiment; and publishing politics, and publics.Less

Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives

Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (eds)

In late December 1817, when attempting to name ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’, which he glossed as ‘being ... More

In late December 1817, when attempting to name ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’, which he glossed as ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the ‘poetical Character’ Keats notes that ‘it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated’. This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.Less