"Sappho's Lyre", written by Diane J. Rayor, is sensationally crafted in chronological order to afford today's modern audience the ability to understand and appreciate the lyrics of ancient Greek poetry. This volume is significant as it includes the works of all the ancient women poets together in one book for the first time ever. Along with the works of the seventeen poets who composed various genres of lyric poetry over 2500 years ago, "Sappho's Lyre" includes an introduction and notes section to explain the characters as well as the history of events taking place during the time each of the poets' lyrics are composed. These poets use their lyrics and musical instruments as a way of communicating the events and feelings of the individuals and their communities during the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods. Diane Rayor does an extraordinary job of explaining in modern day language the growth and development of ancient poetry.
The Facts On File Companion to British Poetry, 17th and 18th Centuries takes its place within a four-volume set on British poetry from the beginnings to the present. As the other volumes do, this one considers British poetry to include that written by English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh poets. Entries address a number of topics, including poets, individual poems, themes important to the period’s poetry (such as carpe diem), genres and forms important in the period (such as the elegy, aubade, and ballad), and poetic groups and movements (including the Cavalier poets and the Tribe of Ben).
Product Description: Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the "New American Poetry" that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets--the "New York School" poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka--Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde's commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Rather than simply celebrating friendship and poetic community as nurturing and inspiring, these poets represent friendship as a kind of exhilarating, maddening contradiction, a site of attraction and repulsion, affinity and rivalry. Challenging both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion, this book provides a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. By situating his extensive and revealing readings of these highly influential poets against the backdrop of Cold War cultural politics and within the context of American pragmatist thought, Epstein uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of postwar American poetry.
In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries.
This rich and highly readable anthology is a comprehensive record of the history and progress of English poetry. Anthologizing the great works from Chaucer through Yeats, The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets brings together the major poets' connections with one another by publishing their criticism, their satire and other comments on their contemporaries as well as their predecessors.
