"Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various - poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers - and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense - her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A companion to the Penguin book of World War 1 poetry, this anthology reflects how society itself was changed by war. It is divided thematically into the case for war, disillusion versus idealism, action versus stoicism and includes selections from the novels of war writers such as Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Erichmaria Remarque, Richard Aldington and and in a section entitled close quarters, letters from, among others, Wilfred Owen.

That Nissim Ezekiel is arguably the most influential, widely read, and appreciated modern Indian poet writing in English is well known. Less well known is that he is also a prose writer of considerable stature, although he has written very extensively with great sensitivity, style, and distinction on literature, art, television, books, and a range of other subjects for well over three decades. This gap in perception stems primarily from his prose writing being scattered in newspapers, journals and introductions to other books, giving readers and critics little opportunity to see them as an intellectually and stylistically distinctive body of work, of an original, inquiring, questing mind, consistent in the view that there are no easy answers to the questions of life and art; that each individual must seek his own anew every time on every issue. This book remedies this gap in perception by bringing together some of Ezekiel's best prose arranged in five sections entitled "On Poetry," "On Philosophy," "On Art and Culture," "On Life and Thought," and "On Books."

Amy Levy was a talented Anglo-Jewish writer who committed suicide at the age of 28 in 1889. During her brief career she published essays, short stories, three novels, and three collections of poetry, but none of them is in print today and her works are to be found almost solely in the closed stacks and rare book collections of university libraries. To correct this unavailability and set the stage for a generous selection of her work, Melvyn New introduces Amy Levy as an unmarried Victorian woman and an urban intellectual, disillusioned by the mores of her culture, yet unable to abandon her identification with the English Jews who embodied so much of what she scorned. He reconstructs her world in 1880s England--a time when the president of the British Medical Association warned his colleagues that educated women would become "more or less sexless. . . . [Such women] have highly developed brains but most of them die young"--raising questions that lead to the tortured heart and mind of this "found" writer.