The Complaint

The Complaint
Author: Edward Young
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1830
Genre: Bookbinding
ISBN:

Night Thoughts, Or, The Complaint and the Consolation

Night Thoughts, Or, The Complaint and the Consolation
Author: Edward Young
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 95
Release: 1996
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780486292144

Superb complete reproduction of 1797 edition of Edward Young's popular poem Night Thoughts, with 43 magnificent illustrations by William Blake. Plate-by-plate commentaries, general introduction, bibliography.

Edward Young: Night Thoughts

Edward Young: Night Thoughts
Author: Edward Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1989-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 052134185X

During the century after its publication in 1742, 'Night Thoughts' was one of the most popular, widely read and influential poems in the English language. However, there have been no editions of the poem since the middle of the nineteenth century. This edition contains a critical introduction setting the poem in the context of the eighteenth-century sublime. There is a commentary which explains historical and linguistic obscurities, and a history of the poem's publication. The text is based on the first editions of the separate 'Nights', and the old spelling has been retained. The editions are collated here, and all substantive variants recorded. Dr Cornford's critical introduction discusses the conception of the poet's role; Young's attitude to the 'imagination' in the context of contemporary epistemology; eighteenth-century attitudes to death and immortality as expressed in sermons and devotional literature; and the critical reception of the poem in Britain and Europe. This discussion seeks to explain why a poem of Christian consolation, orthodox and ancient in its theology, became a seminal work in a secular cult of sepulchral melancholoy.

Stranger by Night

Stranger by Night
Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2020-02-11
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0525657797

In his seventieth year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him. Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn't yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late midcentury Midwest. As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is "stranger by night," but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.

The Graveyard School

The Graveyard School
Author: Robert Blair
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Death in literature
ISBN: 9781941147863

The poetry of the Graveyard School - gloomy meditations on mortality, often composed in churchyards - was immensely popular in 18th-century England and was an important forerunner of the Romantic period and a major influence on the development of the Gothic novel. Yet, despite the unquestioned significance of the Graveyard Poets, critical attention has been scant, and until now there has been no critical anthology of their works. The Graveyard School: An Anthology features works by thirty-three authors and provides a broad and comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of Graveyard poetry. Included are seminal works, such as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Thomas Parnell's "A Night Piece on Death", and excerpts from Edward Young's Night Thoughts, as well as once-popular but now little-remembered poems by authors like Mark Akenside, James Beattie, and James Hervey. Of particular interest in this collection is its inclusion and discussion of authors not normally associated with the Graveyard School, such as Alexander Pope and Washington Irving, as well as a number of female poets, among them Susanna Blamire and Charlotte Smith. Edited by Prof. Jack G. Voller, who provides an introduction and extensive annotations throughout, this volume of melancholy and macabre verse is certain to be welcomed by scholars and students of 18th-century and Gothic literature, as well as those readers interested in the darker side of literature.

Gabriel

Gabriel
Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0385353588

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

10 Good Questions About Life And Death

10 Good Questions About Life And Death
Author: Christopher Belshaw
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1405143835

10 Good Questions about Life and Death makes us think againabout some of the most important issues we ever have to face. Addresses the fundamental questions that many of us ask aboutlife and death. Written in an engaging and straightforward style, ideal forthose with no formal background in philosophy. Focuses on commonly pondered issues, such as: Is life sacred?Is it bad to die? Is there life after death? Does life havemeaning? And which life is best? Encourages readers to think about and respond to the humancondition. Features case studies, thought-experiments, and references toliterature, film, music, religion and myth.