Literary Criticism : Poetry

In this learned, lively, and wide-ranging book, Steve Ellis conducts us on a tour of the appearances that the greatest writer of Middle English has made throughout English-speaking culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Surveying the uses to which Chaucer has been put in modern times, Ellis presents a compelling picture that goes beyond the figure and work of this eminent writer to show us the reach of his imaginative power.“An attractively lucid book, highly intelligent, perceptive, wide-ranging, but also modestly written. The story Ellis has to tell is often quite extraordinary, and it has not been told before.”-Derek Pearsall, Gurney Professor of English, Emeritus, Harvard University more...

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The Augustan age was one in which writers were constantly reworking the Roman past, and which was marked by a profound engagement of poets with historians. In this book 17 leading scholars from Europe and America examine the fascinating interaction between such apparently diverse genres. more...

Price: $159.00

Damon foregrounds a number of modern American poets work and lives in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social “outsiders.” Discussed is the work of Black/Jewish surrealist street poet Bob Kaufman, Boston-Brahmin Robert Lowell and three teenaged women writing from a South Boston housing project, pre-Stonewall gay poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and Jewish lesbian-in-exile Gertrude Stein. more...

Price: $72.00

A new collection of essays from a distinguished critic of contemporary poetry. Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary American poetry writing today. Her works are credited by many with creating and sustaining new critical interest not only in the work of major modernist poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Williams but also in the postwar tradition of American poetic innovation that ranges from the Black Mountain poets, through the New York School and concrete poetry, to the Language Poets of the 1980s and '90s. In Differentials, Perloff explores and defends her belief in the power of close reading, a strategy often maligned as reactionary in today's critical climate but which, when construed differentially, is vital, she believes, to any true understanding of a literary or poetic work, irrespective of how traditional or experimental it is. Perloff also examines key issues in modernism, from Eliot's conservative poetics and Pound's nominalism to translation theory (Wittgenstein, Eugene Jolas, Haroldo de Campos), and the contemporary avant garde, as represented by writers like Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Ronald Johnson, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Perloff's most important offerings in Differentials are her remarkably original reflections on the aesthetic process: on how poetry works, and what it means, in and for our time. "Marjorie Perloff shows once again why she is the most readable—and read—critic of modern and contemporary poetry. In these 'confessions of a close reader,' Perloff delights, cajoles, and informs, with astute essays on both the state of the art and the state of the humanities. From new scholarship on the modernists to vibrant encounters with the newest writing, Perloff's Differentials is an indispensable guide."—Charles Bernstein, coeditor, Modern and Contemporary Poetics series more...

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Price: $36.00