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Subject Area: Poetry Studies-Theme(s)/Thematic
Allen, J. W. T1991 0-7734-9705-6 172 pages
Reproduces in photogravure original pages from several manuscripts of the classical Swahili poem on the Death of the Prophet. The poem is an important witnesss to lore concerning death and especially the death of that paradigmatic human being, the Prophet, among African, West Indian Ocean and Islamic people. Complete transliteration and translation of one manuscript, excerpts from others and of a quotation in a woven mat, with notes on how to decipher and edit texts and literature.
van Leeuwen, Evert Jan
2014 0-7734-4265-0 340 pages
This anthology of graveyard poetry is designed to make available to students of English-language literature this once popular but now rather obscure genre of eighteenth-century verse. It contains foundational graveyard poems, innovative and original variations, notable and frivolous imitations, and several odd and noteworthy transformations by British and American poets.
Selby, Nick
2005 0-7734-6055-1 288 pages
This book examines how the modernist poetics exemplified in Ezra Pound’s epic poem The Cantos are unavoidably bound-in with the ideological forces underpinning his advocacy of fascism. By highlighting Pound’s reliance upon a poetics of loss, the book’s close-readings of The Cantos trace his poetic development from modernism to fascism. It starts with Pound’s assertion – from the end of The Cantos – ‘That I lost my center / fighting the world.’ To counter such a modernist sense of lost culture and ruined history, however, The Cantos relies, paradoxically, on modernist strategies of poetic fragmentation and dissociation. Because Pound’s poem thus confirms the very loss it seeks to eradicate, the book argues that his developing poetic language throughout the poem tends increasingly towards fascism. In following this development, the book provides extended analyses of sections of the poem often overlooked by critics – The China Cantos and The Adams Cantos – as well as new and challenging readings of sections of the poem, such as the The Malatesta Cantos and The Pisan Cantos – that are more familiar to readers of Pound. Overall, it argues that Pound’s reactionary urge to redefine a lost culture, coupled with his sense of the textual annihilation of a validating poetic center, is the cultural ground upon which his ideal of the fascist republic rests.
Delli Carpini, John
1998 0-7734-8380-2 172 pages
This study focuses on poems that are either addressed totally and directly to God or the Blessed Virgin Mary; poems that are prayers in part; and poems that are meditations on a religious theme. It categorizes the poems by the topics most influential in shaping Hopkins' spiritual and poetic life: the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, the dark night of the soul, spiritual wrecking, nature, attainment of spiritual perfection, and the resurrection of the body. It chronicles the progress of Hopkins' spiritual life and his efforts to minimize himself as a poet and render praise and honor to God as a priest, seeking connections among poems, prayers, and spiritual meditations, examining them organically by asking how they reflect Hopkins' erratic relationship to God. It also examines the poems in light of his sermons, letters, and spiritual writings which clarify his religious sentiments and complete the portrait of Hopkins the poet and the priest.
Sexson, Michael
1983 0-88946-957-1 208 pages
An analysis committed to an essentially Jungian "depth method" as it searches for the "central poem" in Stevens' oeuvre.
Norton-Smith, John
1993 0-7734-9257-7 164 pages
The study moves through a close, careful reading of each poem, utilizing linguistic, tabular, and literary historical approaches to build an overall assessment of the collection as a series of experimental transformations, fused experiences, and poetic chronicles. Paying detailed attention to the relationship between formal experimentation and biographical experience, the study presents a poet dedicated to the search for appropriate techniques with which to encapsulate the fleeting experiences of life, a worthy continuer of the tradition of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Pound, and T. S. Eliot.
Edelman, Olivia Maciel
2008 0-7734-4946-9 224 pages
Analyzes how Mexican Surrealist poets Villaurrutia, Paz, and Cernuda employed surrealist metaphors not primarily as a means of semantic dissonance, but to bring together antithetical or complementary states.
McKenzie, Tim
2003 0-7734-6570-7 284 pages
This book examines the poetry of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and R. S. Thomas in light of their shared experience as poets who were also priests. While having twin vocations is a constant that unites them, the poets’ vocational experiences differ markedly in line with the variable periods in which they wrote. Thus each comes up with quite different answers to the question of whether the Voice of the Muse is the same as the Voice of God.