Subject Area: Poetry Criticism

A New and Critical Edition of George Osborn's the Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley (1868-1872), with the Addition of Notes, Annotations, Biographical and Background Information (Volume 10)
 Rogal, Samuel J.
2012 0-7734-2665-5 804 pages
This initial volume of the “New Edition” of George Osborn’s nineteenth-century collection of The Poetry of John and Charles Wesley widens considerably the entrance into access of the original poems of the eighteenth-century Wesleys, as well as their translations and altered versions of others’ poetical works. This “New Edition” provides general readers and researchers alike with necessary background information relative to those poems–details historical, bibliographical, and biographical that Osborn omitted or of which he had no knowledge. This “New Edition” becomes an important research tool, rather than simply a polished reissue of a literary antique under new bindings.

Price: $199.95


An Experimental Reading of Wordsworth's Prelude
 Davis, Graeme
1995 0-7734-1245-X 204 pages
This interdisciplinary study examines the formal experiments of Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude in light of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories in neuroscience. To historians of science, the study argues that the central paradigms of dual-brain theory were advanced as early as 1805 in Wordsworth's experimental verse on the growth of his own mind. For literary critics, this study suggests ways of applying theories from neuroscience to the reading of literary texts. The study seeks to articulate a shared psychology at the center of the revolutionary poetics of the Romantics, also examining Coleridge, Blake, and other British poets.

Price: $179.95


Poetic Meaning in the Eighteenth-Century Poems of Mark Akenside and William Shenstone
 Jung, Sandro
2002 0-7734-6963-X 280 pages


Price: $199.95


Poetics of Loss in the Cantos of Ezra Pound: From Modernism to Fascism
 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.

Price: $199.95


Poetry of Contemporary American Poet Jonathan Holden
 Buchanan, Carl J.
2003 0-7734-6630-4 214 pages
This is the first book to appear on the poetic career of Jonathan Holden, the recipient of numerous prizes, including two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, the Devins Award, the AWP Award Series for Poetry, two Hugh Lake Awards, the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, the Juniper Prize, and others. This study contains close readings of his eight volumes of poetry.

Price: $179.95


Poetry of Roger Mcgough
 Wright, Ben
2006 0-7734-5909-X 344 pages
Examines and evaluates the accessibility of McGough’s message to a wide, general readership, as well as appraising it by the most rigorous literary standards, and to challenge and answer the notion that his popularity and commercial success indicate lack of intellectual integrity. Rather than addressing his association with musical groups, or his appearances on stage, or television and radio performances, attention will be focused on publication and readings of his serious poetry, even in some of the children’s collections, but primarily in the more penetrating social satires such as Summer with Monika, Holiday on Death Row and more recently in Blazing Fruit, The Way Things Are, and Everyday Eclipses.

Price: $219.95


Quest for Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
 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.

Price: $179.95


Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and the Current Status of Poetry’s Place in American Culture
 Walzer, Kevin
2001 0-7734-7554-0 192 pages
This study focuses on a movement called ‘constructive postmodernism’ which, in the work of such theorists as Frederick Turner, has helped to chart new directions for literary theory past the fragmentary impasses of deconstruction, identity politics, and cultural studies. It develops alternative readings of such poets as Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, James Wright, Hayden Carruth, Rita Dove, John Haines, Judson Jerome, and Sam Hamill. The book also raises questions about the status of poetry in contemporary American culture, particularly its relationship with the university.

Price: $159.95


Rise of New Science Epistemological, Linguistic, and Ethical Ideals and the Lyric Genre in the Eighteenth Century
 Bergstrom, Carson R.
2002 0-7734-6909-5 353 pages
This is the first work to study the relationship between the rise of science in the 17th and 18th centuries and the rise to major genre status of the lyric genre. It argues that the epistemological, linguistic, and methodological principles which underlay the rise of the new science also influenced the ways in which poets and critics conceived of the significance and cultural value of the lyric genre. Relying on a wide range of critical commentary from the 17th to the late 18th century, much of it from little known or unknown critical writings, the study shows how the lyric genre became the key for understanding poetry and the function of poetry. It offers a model for understanding the relationships between literature and other cultural experiences, encouraging critical, historical, and multi-disciplinary research.

Price: $239.95


The Poetry of Rowan Williams: An Epistolary Explication (hardcover)
 Snare, Gerald
2024 1-4955-1187-1 132 pages
"The Name here is Rowan Williams. What we usually know about Williams is as Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012) and the issues that made the newspapers. His notable academic background may be a little less known: besides being holder of three Bishoprics, he has held two University Chancellorships and the Chair as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, was voted a Fellow of the British Acadermy, and is the recepient of a remarkable number of awards, honorary doctorates...the list goes on. Rowan Williams is also a poet. [And one] may consider whether Williams is a serious poet. Can Williams be reckoned among those poietes, "makers," creators? Can we add him to that troup of the "il meglior fabbro" (that "better maker") of Dante's famous homage to his great Troubadour forebear, Arnaut Daniel, a distinction T.S. Eliot consciously echoes in his own homage to Ezra Pound? To assess and indeed to understand what Williams has accomplished, we have to avoid the requisite quotations of avid admirers on the book covers and look instead at [some] of his poems in detail...." -Dr. Gerald Snare (Introduction)

Price: $129.95


What is Poetry? Critical Essays on Ezra Pound, Chinua Achebe, Roy Campbell, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Langston Hughes, Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, Archilochus (softcover)
 Obiwu
2022 1-4955-0935-4 123 pages
From the Introduction:
"Poetry is like song, or rather, poetry is song. If we say the first, we are right. If we say the second, we are also right. No wonder the Belgium committee of the Nobel Prize gave the literature prize to, of all people, Bob Dylan, in 2016. In other words, they gave it to a singer; a music composer. Which is to say that much of poetry can be sung, and much of song can be poetic."

Price: $59.95