The English Poetic Epitaph

The English Poetic Epitaph
Author: Joshua Scodel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1991
Genre: Death in literature
ISBN: 9780801424823

In the first major study of the genre, Joshua Scodel shows how English poets have used the poetic epitaph to express their views concerning the power and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality.

Keats

Keats
Author: Lucasta Miller
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525655840

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge. In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment. We see how Keats was regarded by his contemporaries (his writing was seen as smutty) and how the young poet’s large and boisterous life—a man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphilis—went straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writing—considered marginal and avant-garde in his own day—retains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.

Quoting Death in Early Modern England

Quoting Death in Early Modern England
Author: S. Newstok
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2008-12-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0230594786

An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts.

Cut These Words into My Stone

Cut These Words into My Stone
Author:
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421408058

The lively ancient epitaphs in this bilingual collection fit together like small mosaic tiles, forming a vivid portrait of Greek society. Cut These Words into My Stone offers evidence that ancient Greek life was not only celebrated in great heroic epics, but was also commemorated in hundreds of artfully composed verse epitaphs. They have been preserved in anthologies and gleaned from weathered headstones. Three-year-old Archianax, playing near a well, Was drawn down by his own silent reflection. His mother, afraid he had no breath left, Hauled him back up wringing wet. He had a little. He didn't taint the nymphs' deep home. He dozed off in her lap. He's sleeping still. These words, translated from the original Greek by poet and filmmaker Michael Wolfe, mark the passing of a child who died roughly 2,000 years ago. Ancient Greek epitaphs honor the lives, and often describe the deaths, of a rich cross section of Greek society, including people of all ages and classes— paupers, fishermen, tyrants, virgins, drunks, foot soldiers, generals—and some non-people—horses, dolphins, and insects. With brief commentary and notes, this bilingual collection of 127 short, witty, and often tender epigrams spans 1,000 years of the written word. Cut These Words into My Stone provides an engaging introduction to this corner of classical literature that continues to speak eloquently in our time.

Byron’s Poetry

Byron’s Poetry
Author: Peter Cochran
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144383937X

Byron’s dubious status as a sex object, and his even more dubious status as a political icon, serves to disguise the fact that he is one of the greatest of all English poets, with a European reputation second only to Shakespeare. The fact that writers such as Goethe and Pushkin held him in the highest regard ensures that the English continue to despise him, and ignore his verse as much as possible. This book ignores his sexuality, his politics, and his iconography, and concentrates on his poems. Written by leading authorities such as Bernard Beatty, Germaine Greer and Michael O’Neill, it contains essays on his verse-forms and his comic rhymes, as well as thematic analyses on such recurrent Byronic themes as the Sea, Will-o’-the-Wisps, and Love versus Knowledge. In the face of many modern books which translate his verse into prose and try without success to analyse the result, Byron’s Poetry puts his real achievement – as a creative writer – back into the focus of discussion.

English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789

English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789
Author: David Fairer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317892879

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer’s book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject. This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing so Fairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.

Poetry as Epitaph

Poetry as Epitaph
Author: Karen Mills-Courts
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780807116579

Mills-Courts (English, SUNY at Fredonia) maintains that all poets attempt to embody meaning in words that are inherently epitaphic, and explores the strategies they employ to defend the illusion of voice and presence in their works against the disseminative forces of representation. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Big Blonde

Big Blonde
Author: Dorothy Parker
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
Total Pages: 22
Release: 2021-11-08T14:41:00Z
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 177464360X

Short story, winner of the 1929 O. Henry Award. The big blonde in question is Hazel Morse, who, when we meet her, is "a model in a wholesale dress establishment", whose thoughts are largely devoted to men. Then she meets Herbie Morse, an attractive man and a heavy drinker. Where will events now take her?

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198930232

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.