A collection of poems by the following 19th-20th century English poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Graves, William Empson, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath.
It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie Boulton shows that it is possible to approach a poem from a business-like perspective without losing enjoyment. This reissue will be of particular value to students as well as those with a general interest in the specifics of poetry.
While atheists such as Richard Dawkins have now become public figures, there is another and perhaps darker strain of religious rebellion that has remained out of sight--people who hate God. In this revealing book, Bernard Schweizer looks at men and women who do not question God's existence, but deny that He is merciful, competent, or good. Sifting through a wide range of literary and historical works, Schweizer finds that people hate God for a variety of reasons. Some are motivated by social injustice, human suffering, or natural catastrophes that God does not prevent. Some blame God for their personal tragedies. Schweizer concludes that, despite their blasphemous thoughts, these people tend to be creative and moral individuals, and include such literary lights as Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Elie Wiesel, and Philip Pullman. Schweizer shows that literature is a fertile ground for God haters. Many authors, who dare not voice their negative attitude to God openly, turn to fiction to give vent to it. Indeed, Schweizer provides many new and startling readings of literary masterpieces, highlighting the undercurrent of hatred for God. Moreover, by probing the deeper mainsprings that cause sensible, rational, and moral beings to turn against God, Schweizer offers answers to some of the most vexing questions that beset human relationships with the divine.
Passion and Precision contains twenty essays on a range of major medieval and modern English and Irish poets. The first part consists of three chapters on Chaucer, including a substantial new study of Troilus and Criseyde, four on Chaucer’s great contemporary the Pearl-poet, and one comparing the two poets. The core of the second part is six chapters on T. S. Eliot, three of them pioneering explorations of his poetic language. They are preceded by three on Hopkins, Shelley and Yeats (including a new study of Yeats’s verse-technique), and followed by one on David Jones and Auden, and two on Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. The previously published essays have been extensively revised, supplemented with appendixes and cross-referenced, and a full Bibliography and Index are provided. The author brings to his reading of ten representative poets from two widely separated periods of English literature, the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, the same passionate and precise attention as they brought to their writing.
First Published in 1979. This volume includes simple and systematic introduction to the more important post-war English poets. Including reviews of the poetry of Larkin, Tomlinson, Gunn, Hughes, Plath, Heaney and more. This work will appeal to A-level students, undergraduates, members of adult education classes and general readers enjoying modern literature.
