Reading the odyssey

A fresh and original introduction to the Odyssey—and how it continues to shape literature, film, art and even the ways we make sense of our livesReading the Odyssey is an introduction to Homer’s masterpiece like no other. It combines a cultural and intellectual history of the epic with an in-dept...

Rhythm and race in modernist poetry and science

In the half-century between 1890 and 1950, a variety of fields and disciplines, from musicology and literary studies to biology, psychology, genetics, and eugenics, expressed a profound interest in the subject of rhythm. In this book, Michael Golston recovers much of the work done in this area an...

Ritsos in parentheses

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American PoetsA bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth centuryOne of the most prolific and popular of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent pred...

Rome's patron

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and cultureAn unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalitie...

Sebald's vision

A major new assessment of one of the most important writers of the late twentieth century and his work with history and its representation.

Sex and style

A new literary history that places women writers at the center of poetic theory and practice in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Many of the terms we use today to describe poetic style originated in the early modern period: original ideas, feminine rhyme, irregular rh...

Sexual violence and literary art

Sexual Violence and Literary Art addresses the complicity of representation in what is represented, and its creative transformations, by re-examining classic poetic, dramatic and fictional texts by men in light of women’s philosophical, theoretical and critical responses to them.

Shakespeare on love and lust

The complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works—ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again—arise primarily from his dramatic and theatrical flair rather than from a unified philosophy of love. Untangling his witty, bawdy (and ambiguous) treatment of l...

Stitch, unstitch

In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan argues that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labor and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways of life beyond the demand to earn a living.

The age of anxiety

The first critical edition of a poem that named an eraWhen it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety—W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem—immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginni...

The american poet laureate

The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate.

The art of poetry

An authoritative collection of Valéry’s important essays on poetryThis volume collects all of Paul Valéry’s major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry. These pieces range from his first essay, “On Literary Technique” (1889), to his last, “Variations on the Eclogues” (1944). Among them...

The book of rain

Named a Best Book of 2025 by Books Without BordersA vivid translation of Abū Zayd alAnṣārī’s early Arabic weather lexicon, Book of Rain reveals a richly detailed linguistic landscape devoted to the many forms of rain.The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.So begins translator Davi...

The bridge

Now in paperback, with a new preface and clear, reader-friendly annotations that unlock Crane’s landmark poem.

The city of poetry

Orr imagines poetry as a city constructed of its forms and forebears, its terrain all that can be imagined.

The classic of poetry

Edward L. Shaughnessy presents a complete English translation of the 305 discrete poems from the Classic of Poetry.

The classroom and the crowd

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Al Filreis reflects on his decades of experience as a founder of participatory literary communities and teacher of online courses, demonstrating that student-centered education offers new possibilities for humane social networking.

The columbia companion to modern chinese literature

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern lite...

The critical writings of ingeborg bachmann

The first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in German.The Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most important postwar writers in G...

The dancer and the dance: a book of distinctions

The difference is spreading

Since its inception in 2012, the hugely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has engaged some 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson up to some of toda...

The dynastic drama of beowulf

A strikingly original approach to Beowulf, linking its structure to the dynastic life-cycle.The original audience of Beowulf was steeped in ancient Scandinavian royal legend. But for modern readers of the poem, these traditions are frustratingly obscure and confusing. This book argues that Beowul...

The ethnic avant-garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde remaps global modernism and interwar literary, political, and art history along minority and Soviet-centered lines. Steven S. Lee details an absorbing collage of writers and artists who cohered around experimental techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption, advancing...

The extinct scene

Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that refle...

The fetters of rhyme

How rhyme became entangled with debates about the nature of liberty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetryIn his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage...

The first book

An illuminating look at the poetic debut in twentieth-century American literary culture"We have many poets of the First Book," the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come...

The first modern japanese

A biography of Japanese tanka master Ishikawa Takuboku, who pioneered an unmistakably modern poetic style.

The forms of youth

Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and a...

The freest speech in russia

The first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry and its embrace of freedom—formally, thematically, and spirituallySince 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural...

The ghost of shakespeare

This first edition of the collected critical prose of Anna Frajlich, scholar of Polish literature and culture and award-winning Polish poet, presents comparative studies of major modern Polish writers, including Choromański, Grynberg, Herbert, Milosz, Schulz, Szymborska, and Wittlin.

The lives of the poems and three talks

Lectures that meander, accumulate, and adjust in an echolocating search for the in-between places where poetry lives.

The living stream

Edna Longley’s second collection of essays for Bloodaxe investigates the links between Irish literature (especially contemporary poetry), Irish culture and Irish politics. The Living Stream takes its title from Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’: ‘Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through summer and winter ...

The lyrical in epic time

In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyrici...

The man of the crowd

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writingsEdgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produce...

The music of time

A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John BurnsidePoetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "noise of time" into a kind of music. The Music of Time is a unique histo...

The owl and the nightingale

From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complete verse translation of a spirited and humorous medieval English poemThe Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two bird...

The poet and existence

This book presents a critical study of five poetry collections by the Iraqi poet Hatif Janabi (Hātif Janābī) published between 1998 and 2017. This study seeks to address essential aspects of Janabi’s poetry, related to its ideational and philosophical contents, focusing on the major milestones of...

The poetics of the everyday

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"—recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Rober...

The poetry of yuan haowen

John Timothy Wixted’s treatment of 150 of Yuan Haowen’s poems distills available scholarship on the poet.

The power of adrienne rich

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice“A comprehensive biography of . . . one of the most acclaimed poets of her generation and a face of American feminism.”—New York TimesA major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcl...

The princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics

The most important poetry reference for more than four decades—now fully updated for the twenty-first century Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative referenc...

The rise of autobiographical medical poetry and the medical humanities

In this fascinating book, Johanna Emeney examines the global proliferation of new poetry related to illness and medical treatment from the perspective of doctors, patients, and carers in light of the growing popularity of the medical humanities. She provides a close analysis of poetry from New Ze...

The river of time

This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics.

The shahnameh

Hamid Dabashi insightfully traces the history, authorship, poetic significance, complicated legacy, and enduring significance of the Iranian epic poem the Shahnameh. In addition to explaining what makes it such a distinctive literary work, he makes a powerful case that we need to rethink the noti...