Drawing on modern historical scholarship, rather than speculation, this book links the plays and poetry closely to the life of their author and sets the whole chronicle against the vivid tapestry backdrop of Shakespeare's world and time.

This critical biography analyzes Tennyson's poetic development and his place in literature. It describes his influences, both classical and personal, and illuminates his working methods, for example: a constant revision of earlier material and an emphasis on oral rather than written poetry. Levi gives detailed textual criticism of some poems, but also shows acute psychological understanding of, for example, how Tennyson's famous friendship with Arthur Hallam affected his poetry over a long lifetime. Tennyson's relationships, often stormy but also affectionate, with other important figures of the Victorian era such as Gladstone, Carlyle and Queen Victoria herself, are vividly described, as are his attitudes towards other poets such as Wordsworth, whom he succeeded as Poet Laureate in 1850, and the same year that he married Emily Sellwood after an extraordinary 17-year engagement.

a book of English Christian verse . first edition. published in 1988.

This is an account of the life and career of John Milton. The book traces the development of Milton's poetry from the Latin intimations of his boyhood through the lyrical poems of his youth, Lycidas, Comus and the Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity to the achievements of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, offering Levi's own interpretations of the poems and placing them in the context of Milton's contemporaries and his times. Levi's own translations of some of Milton's Latin poems are also included.

Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three books on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape. This title includes his early books, pamphlets and other uncollected poems.

In these poems written since `Five Ages' (1978), Peter Levi continues to explore man's elemental relationship with the natural world, recording his sense of the indivisible unity of life in its changing aspects.

Peter Levi is one of the most accomplished and individual lyric poets now writing. This is his fourth collection, containing 40 poems, mostly written - some in Greece and Afghanistan, the majority in England - since the publication of `Fresh Water, Sea Water' (1966). They develop the intimate, almost mystical element which is the keynote of his work. John Bayley writing in `Agenda' described this as "his power of taking an active situation, emotion or longing, and revealing beneath and around it the quality that Napoleon called `repose'." `Death is a Pulpit', containing poems written for public performance, is published simultaneously.

This book contains five poems, each written for public performance on a special occasion. Traditional forms - mainly the heroic couplet - are used in a new way under a new necessity. A poem on the art of satire is followed by three sermons - for Christmas, Whitsun and the feast of St Thomas More - and the concluding poem is an elegy for T. S. Eliot. Together they complement the more personal poems collected in `Life is a Platform', which is published simultaneously.

For a while after becoming almost completely blind, Peter Levi found it almost impossible to compose verse; but he has recovered his gift, and this book contains the moving lyrics he composed in his head, as well as other poems.

Poetica 19 Peter Levi's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. He puts forward the view that `The Lament for Arthur O'Leary', composed by his widow Eileen O'Connell, is among the finest examples of the lamentation of the dead, and the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole of the eighteenth century. The text of Peter Levi's lecture is followed by Eilís Dillon's translation of the poem.