Poetry

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden’s immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects — to an extent remarkable for the times — the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning, including Grotius, Jonson, and Milton, gladly conceded Selden’s superiority. Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, this is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. The book traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden’s own thought, such as his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise, and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden’s discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of the impact of Selden’s uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship.

This book is a reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759–96), arguably the most original poet writing in Great Britain between Pope and Blake, and creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. Although still celebrated as Scotland's national poet, Burns has long been marginalised in English literary studies worldwide, due to a mistaken view that his poetry is linguistically incomprehensible and of interest to Scottish readers only. This book challenges this view by interpreting Burns's poetry as an innovative and critical engagement with the experience of rural modernity, namely to the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thereby resituating it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. Detailed study of the literary, social, and historical contexts of Burns's poetry explodes the myth of the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’, revealing his poetic artfulness and critical acumen as a social observer, as well as his significance as a Romantic precursor. The book discusses Burns's radical decision to write ‘Scots pastoral’ (rather than English georgic) poetry in the tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, focusing on themes of Scottish and British identity, agricultural improvement, poetic self-fashioning, language, politics, religion, patronage, poverty, antiquarianism, and the animal world. The book offers interpretations of all Burns's major poems and some of the songs, the first to do so since Thomas Crawford's landmark study of 1960. It concludes with a new assessment of his importance for British Romanticism and to a ‘Four Nations’ understanding of Scottish literature and culture.

This study of seven poets challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the perception of time and space, and various ways of grasping the sensible and the spiritual, the human and the divine, jointly or separately characterize the minds of John Donne and George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne. Fundamental mental structures affect their attitudes to love, death, and God, and dictate their privileged modes of composition and expression. Without neglecting the relations between these individual traits and the general evolution of thought from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, or the immediate cultural environment in which each poet wrote, this critical study maintains the primacy of individual choice, of the ‘unchanging self’. The book is not based on a theory, but on a close scrutiny of the characteristic interplay of personal modes of thought and sensibility.

This study reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. It discusses Wyatt’s self-conscious reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words are turned in new directions over the course of a text’s production, transmission and reception. Where previous studies have aligned Wyatt’s poetry with his courtly biography, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and considers the types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections of his verse. By setting Wyatt’s writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational treatises, rhetorical handbooks, and manuals of courtly behaviour, this monograph examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt’s texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to ‘turn’ or perform the word—to draw out something that lies inert within it. These rescriptive habits often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers. Special attention is paid to the materiality of Wyatt’s texts: the margins around and the interlinear spaces within his poems are regularly filled with new text, supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt’s main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or ‘balets’. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission. Throughout, this study argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and that acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively.

The rhymes in poems are important to understanding how poets write; and in the nineteenth century, rhyme conditioned the ways in which poets heard both themselves and each other writing. This book studies the significance of rhyme in Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and other poets, including Coleridge, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Swinburne, and Hardy. The book’s stylistic reading of nineteenth-century poetry argues for Wordsworth’s centrality to issues of intention and chance in poets’ work, and offers a reading of the formal choices made in poetry as profoundly revealing points of intertextual relation. The book ranges widely, and includes detailed consideration of the critical meaning of both rhyme and repetition, bringing to bear an emphasis on form as poetry’s crucial proving-ground. In a series of detailed readings of important poems, the book shows how close formal attention goes beyond critical formalism, and can become a way of illuminating poets’ deepest preoccupations, doubts, and beliefs. Wordsworth’s sounding of his own poetic voice, in blank verse as well as rhyme, is here taken as a model for the ways in which later nineteenth-century poets attend to the most perplexing and important voicings of their own poetic originality.

This book conducts readings of four contemporary British poets whose work differently probes the politics of intimate speech and space: Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Graham, Don Paterson, and C. H. Sisson. The book explores the ways in which these poets, and their peers, have used address to perform public, political, and economic (as well as personal) work. In speaking to a changing succession of yous (readers and critics, purchasers and fellow writers, friends and adversaries), contemporary poetry repeatedly probes address’s powerfully public remit. The book opens up new ways into thinking about poetry’s civic clout: in Modernist and contemporary writing; in classical, early modern, and Romantic periods; in aesthetic and commercial spheres. To say you today is to perform historical work, and to rethink national, regional, and personal identities. The book engages an interplay of contemporary, Modernist, Movement, and theoretical voices, and also provides a literary history of address’s public intimacies, reading the contemporary poet as responsive to classical, medieval, early modern, and Romantic traditions. Part I, on W. S. Graham, is attentive to the public nature of the apparently private uses of addresses to known recipients. Part II, on C. H. Sisson, focuses on the use of the lyric you for national and historical negotiations. Part III turns to the late work of Geoffrey Hill, scrutinizing the addresses of the public intellectual, who hails an audience, a body of critics and reviewers, and a book-buying public. A final fourth part brings together these ideas in Don Paterson, whose historically minded addresses repeatedly depict poets provokingly compromised by their manoeuvres in the contemporary poetry industry, and demand you attend to literature’s commercial production, circulation, and reception.

This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902–71). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as a dotty eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. The book follows her work through draft and proof stages, showing her reluctance to cede editorial control to her publishers, considers how her performances undermine her printed texts, and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry. It also draws on reader-response theory to re-examine the construction of her literary biography in her novels and essays, recasting her as mastermind, rather than victim, of her own critical reputation. The book is also the first to consider the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.