Download or read book The Blank Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens written by Henry Weinfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blank verse has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance, most famously in Shakespeare's plays and in Paradise Lost. Henry Weinfield's detailed readings of the masterpieces of English blank verse focus on Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens, tracing what lies behind their choice of form.
Download or read book The Blank Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens written by Henry Weinfield and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed study of Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens, tracing what lies behind their choice of blank verse.
Download or read book Milton and the Resources of the Line written by John Creaser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will change how readers read not only Milton but any poetry. Whereas prose is written in sentences, poetry is written in lines, lines that may or may not coincide with the syntax of the sentence. Lines add an aural and visual mode of punctuation, with some degree of pause and weight at the line-turn. So lineation, the division of poetry into lines, opens a repertoire of possibilities to the poet. Notably, it encourages an enhanced concentration on meaning, rhythm, and sound. It makes metrical patterns possible, with interactions between regularity and deviation; or it makes possible the presence or absence of structural rhyme; or the multiple variations of the line-turn, whether in harmony with syntax or overflowing, in ways that may be either more or less conspicuous. Starting from theories of Derek Attridge, this book develops new methods for exploring the expressive resources of the verse line as exploited by the greatest of English poets, John Milton. Topics examined include: the interaction of strictness and freedom in the rhythms of Milton's line and paragraph; the interfusion of diverse prosodies in a single poem; approaches to free verse; rhyme in the earlier lyric verse and modes of near-rhyme in the later blank verse; the diverse modes of onomatopoeia; and the complex interweavings of prosody and ideology in this very political poet. The great themes and issues and characters of Milton's innovative and always controversial poetry are perceived afresh, being approached intimately through the rich possibilities of the line, and the insights of the approach illuminate the reading of any poetry.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Poetry in English written by Laura L. Knoppers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-08 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Poetry in English written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-08 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.
Download or read book Elizabeth Bishop s Prosaic written by Vidyan Ravinthiran and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched—and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop’s verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose—structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop’s prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop’s thinking about prose to approach—for the first time—her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole. Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among others—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture—in both Bishop’s prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop’s work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.
Download or read book World of Echo written by Adin E. Lears and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As Lears shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity—including lay women—to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. World of Echo offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.
Download or read book An Introduction to Poetic Forms written by Patrick Gill and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Introduction to Poetic Forms offers specimen discussions of poems through the lens of form. While each of its chapters does provide a standard definition of the form in question in its opening paragraphs, their main objective is to provide readings of specific examples to illustrate how individual poets have deviated from or subverted those expectations usually associated with the form under discussion. While providing the most vital information on the most widely taught forms of poetry, then, this collection will very quickly demonstrate that counting syllables and naming rhyme schemes is not the be-all and end-all of poetic form. Instead, each chapter will contain cross-references to other literary forms and periods as well as make clear the importance of the respective form to the culture at large: be it the democratising communicative power of the ballad or the objectifying male gaze of the blazon and resistance to same in the contreblazon – the efficacy of form is explored in the fullness of its cultural dimensions. In using standard definitions only as a starting point and instead focusing on lively debates around the cultural impact of poetic form, the textbook helps students and instructors to see poetic forms not as a static and lifeless affair but as living, breathing testament to the ongoing evolution of cultural debates. In the final analysis, the book is interested in showing the complexities and contradictions inherent in the very nature of literary form itself: how each concrete example deviates from the standard template while at the same time employing it as a foil to generate meaning.
Download or read book Study Guide to an Introduction of Wallace Stevens written by Intelligent Education and published by Influence Publishers. This book was released on 2020-06-28 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Wallace Stevens including a brief commentary on a number of Stevens’ works, which explore his philosophies on reality and imagination. As an author of the early twentieth-century, Stevens considered his work as continuing the ideas American realization introduced by Emerson and Whitman. Moreover, Stevens’ poetry is structured around literary devices like iambic pentameter, blank verse, and abundant symbolism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Stevens’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.
Download or read book Meter and Modernity in English Verse 1350 1650 written by Eric Weiskott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.
Download or read book Dante and Milton written by Christoph Lehner and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante Alighieri and John Milton, two composers of vernacular epic poems, undoubtedly hold prominent positions in the literary canons of Italy and England respectively. Both authors have been made into universally important icons deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory; their importance, however, extends vastly beyond their mere literary and political influence. This anthology explores the synchronic and diachronic constructions of Dante and Milton as such culturally produced icons. The main focus of the contributions in this collection is the production of cultural memory regarding Dante and Milton. The juxtaposition and comparison of the two authors invites a broader perspective that goes beyond merely national contexts as it touches on the question of the emergence of a European Dante and a European Milton. At the same time, the comparison of both allows for an exploration of various processes, namely of appropriating, forgetting and side-lining parts of their histories and politics – processes which the works and legacies of both authors have been subjected to throughout their literary and cultural reception.
Download or read book Milton among Spaniards written by Angelica Duran and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study calls attention to a series of powerful engagements by Spaniards with Milton’s works and legend, following a general chronology from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, tracing the overall story of Milton’s presence from indices of prohibited works during the Inquisition, through the many Spanish translations of Paradise Lost, to the author’s depiction on stage in the nineteenth-century play Milton, and finally to the representation of Paradise Lost by Spanish visual artists.
Download or read book Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton written by John Rumrich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeenth-century England teemed with speculation on body and its relation to soul. Descartes' dualist certainty was countered by materialisms, whether mechanist or vitalist. The most important and distinctive literary reflection of this ferment is John Milton's vitalist or animist materialism, which underwrites the cosmic worlds of Paradise Lost. In a time of philosophical upheaval and innovation, Milton and an unusual collection of fascinating and diverse contemporary writers, including John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, John Bunyan, and Hester Pulter, addressed the potency of the body, now viewed not as a drag on the immaterial soul or a site of embarrassment but as an occasion for heroic striving and a vehicle of transcendence. This collection addresses embodiment in relation to the immortal longings of early modern writers, variously abetted by the new science, print culture, and the Copernican upheaval of the heavens.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry 1660 1800 written by Jack Lynch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, a team of leading experts surveys the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity. They provide a systematic overview, and restore these poetic works to a position of centrality in modern criticism.
Download or read book The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller written by Jon Curley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry written by Deborah Ager and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry collects more than 200 poems by over 100 poets to celebrate contemporary writers, born after World War II, who write about Jewish themes. In bringing together poets whose writings explore cultural Jewish topics with those who directly address Jewish religious themes as well as those who only indirectly touch on their Jewishness, this anthology offers a fascinating insight into what it is to be a Jewish poet. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, included are poems by, among others, Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Ed Hirsch, David Lehman, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Judith Skillman, Jacqueline Osherow, Alan Shapiro, Ira Sadoff, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, Philip Schultz, and Jane Shore.
Download or read book The Labyrinth of Love written by Pierre de Ronsard and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hailed as the Prince of Poets of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard composed a rich body of love poetry that has captivated audiences and challenged scholars for many centuries through its undulating, liquid forms and powerful metamorphic imagination. Blending oneiric fantasy and mythological profusion . . . this poetry appeals to readers steeped in the classical tradition and receptive to an esthetic of vitality and abundance rather than the brooding self-pity more characteristic of Petrarchism. This new translation captures the essence of a poetic legacy whose exuberance and emotion can still be deeply felt today.” —Eric MacPhail, author of Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress “Ronsard is a towering figure in the history of European poetry, but his work is little read these days other than in the form of single-line quotations. Henry Weinfield has made a substantial selection that reflects different aspects of Ronsard’s immense output from his earliest love-sonnets to his death-bed meditations. Translating sixteenth-century French poetry into English verse while remaining close to the original is a formidable task, but Weinfield’s sensitivity and ingenuity are equal to the challenge: he has found an idiom which both retains the flavor of the Renaissance and remains fluent and transparent to modern ears. The French text is provided on facing pages so that even those unfamiliar with early modern French will be able to explore the original. This is an important act of cultural transference that will give Ronsard’s extraordinary poetic imagination a new lease of life for readers of the twenty-first century.” —Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College “First came Henry Weinfield’s irreplaceable versions of Mallarmé in 1994, and now comes a second masterpiece of translation with this new selection of Ronsard. Weinfield has a supernatural talent for rendering the most difficult poets into clear, cadenced, and beautiful English. The man is a wizard.” — Paul Auster, Editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry