The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this century. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."--Back cover

This reinterpretation of the full sweep of English and American romantic poetry offers close readings of poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, and Stevens. It also reviews the crucial ideas of Emerson, Nietzsche, and in particular Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of repression and defense Bloom undertakes to revise for purposes of literary criticism. "Bloom offers a fully defined alternative to the principal modes of contemporary criticism, from Freudian literary criticism (which he insists is neither Freudian nor literary criticism) to the New Criticism and structuralist and archetypal approaches. It is an original, vigorous, and passionate study which is both compelling and provocative."-The British Studies Monitor "Show me but one paragraph of Bloom's approaches to texts, and I'm hooked. . . . I find sheer delight in his ingenious ways."-Kenneth Burke "Bloom has made a remarkable contribution to poetic theory."-Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader

For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life—sexualities, loves, damages, struggles—as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this. "Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women—from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.

Includes some poems translated from French, German and Italian.

The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. "Howard Nemerov is a witty, urbane, thoughtful poet, grounded in the classics, a master of the craft. It is refreshing to read his work. . . . "— Minneapolis Tribune "The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review

In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal—dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing—leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

This book is a major reappraisal of Byron's poetry, which grapples firmly with the paradox of his work - that in spite of his enormous influence, the magnetic power of his personality, and the fascination of his life, the poetry is often of inferior quality and so inconsistent in its attitudes that Byron's poetic seriousness is inevitably called into question. The focus of the book is the nature of Byron's relationship with his public and its effect on his poetry; a subject that has remained largely unexplored. Dr Martin considers Byron's anomalous position as an aristocrat in a literary market governed by commercial interests and middle class tastes and reading habits. He suggests that the whole of Byron's poetry can be seen as a performance determined by a number of factors: Byron's anxieties about his modernity, his contemporaries, and the image his readers were ready to fashion for him.

John Hollander's Blue Wine and Other Poems, his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume―"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"―move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

Book by Levertov, Denise

In the sixty poems that comprise The Freeing of the Dust, Denise Levertov continued to explore the personal and public themes that threaded through her work during the disastrous American involvement in Indochina. Relations with family and close friends are depicted with unique poignancy as she pits the at times terrifying concrete image against her vision of the ideal. Here we have poems that speak out of the direct tragedy of war, the result of Ms. Levertov's visit to North Vietnam in the fall of 1972, while others reflect the anguish and the exultation of what she has called the 'inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's.

An anthology of poetry, old and new, by a variety of poets from all over the world.

Book by Levine, Philip

An illustrated collection of humorous poems about friends, family, and a variety of daily experiences.