Poetry

Although Housman's three collections of poems, the third published posthumously, have remained popular, they have not received much serious critical attention. The author makes good the omission in this reappraisal of the whole oeuvre, placing Housman's achievement in the context of the poetry of his own time and of more recent European and American poetry. Close analysis and comparison with other poets – Hardy, Frost, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and Paul Celan – prove illuminating in relation to a poet who has usually been considered something of an odd man out, and even an anachronism in the modern era. The author explores and explains the continuing appeal of the poet to present-day readers, and the nature of the craftsmanship and psychology which lie behind the deceptive simplicities of his poetry.

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, “irrelevant descriptions of nature” in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art and make relevant poems out of their observations.

This is a full-scale biography of the poet and playwright James Thomson for forty years. On the personal side, it places him in his social and cultural setting: as a welcome member of the disparate circles that surrounded Alexander Pope, Richard Savage, Aaron Hill, James Quin, George Bubb Dodington, George Lyttelton, Lady Hertford, and Frederick, Prince of Wales. More significantly, for the first time, Thomson's involvement in politics is thoroughly explored. The analysis of his Scottish Whiggism and his role as the poet of Britannia and Liberty places the poetry in a clear ideological light, which at once deepens our understanding of Thomson the man, and illuminates the political groupings of the period. Drawing on his understanding of Thomson's poetry, the author also supplies a full critical analysis of the whole body of Thomson's writings. This new book maintains an even balance between biography, history, and literary criticism, and forms both a study of the man and a companion to the Oxford English Texts edition of the poems.

In this book, the author argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value of works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and a man, John Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.

The century between the Restoration and David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee saw Shakespeare's promotion from the status of archaic, rustic playwright to that of England's timeless Bard, and with it the complete transformation of the ways in which his plays were staged, published, and read. The first question is: why Shakespeare? Secondly, what different interests did this process serve? This book studies the Restoration and 18th century's revisions and revaluations, and it considers the period's much reviled stage adaptations in the context of profound cultural changes. Drawing on a wide range of evidence — including engravings, prompt-books, diaries, statuary, and previously unpublished poems (among them traces of the hitherto mysterious Shakespeare Ladies' Club) — the book examines how and why Shakespeare was retrospectively claimed as both a respectable Enlightenment author and a crucial and contested symbol of British national identity. It shows in particular how the deification of Shakespeare co-existed with and even demanded the drastic and sometimes bizarre rewriting of his plays for which the period is notorious. The book provides, through engaging and informative analysis, the definitive account of the theatre's role in establishing Shakespeare as Britain's National Poet.

Mary Leapor, a Northamptonshire kitchen maid, produced a substantial body of exceptional poetry that was only published after her early death at the age of twenty-four. This is a timely examination of the work of a poet who has remained almost forgotten for 200 years. Leapor is one of many gifted poets, mainly women and labourers, whose work stands outside the traditional canon of eighteenth-century verse. This book draws on extensive primary research to present substantial new information about Leapor's life. It discusses her protests against the injustices suffered by women and the poor, her attempts to gain an education, and the influence that illness and the expectation of an early death had upon her writing. Throughout, Leapor is seen in relation to both the mainstream poets of her time and to those whom literary history has consigned to obscurity. The book thus provides insight not only into the work of a single neglected woman poet, but offers a sometimes surprising perspective on the literary history of the ‘Ages of Pope and Johnson’.