... and class dimensions of their disaster before a multiracial mass audience. The chapter also considers a poem that appeared in print in April 1927, which must have seemed a providential coincidence to many readers. The poem, called “Noah Built the Ark,” moves from the halcyon days in Eden to the point...

...This chapter evaluates Virgil's Georgics, an agricultural poem composed in 29 BCE. In Georgics, Virgil celebrates diversification, seasonality and fertility, differences of scale and size; he encourages loving scrutiny of soil types, tiny insects, grafting...

...This concluding chapter returns to Palestinian Hebrew writing with a poem by Salman Masalha and its intertextual invocation of a sonnet corona by the canonical early twentieth-century Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky. Masalha's poem, provocatively titled “Ha-tikva” (“The Hope”), appropriates...

... to stress the ways in which the poems resist interpretation while ignoring many of the ways in which they encourage and support it. Ashbery John Auden W H Brunner Edward Davidson Eugene Hecht Anthony O’Hara Frank Yale Series of Younger Poets Award Bradley George Kallman Chester Rimbaud Arthur...

...This concluding chapter brings up to date the history of first-book prizes begun in Chapter 2. Supplementing the interpretation of poems with the interpretation of debut paratexts, this chapter shows how the prize-winning debut—framed by lyrical prefaces, elaborate acknowledgments, and other, often...

... at times of addressees and other figures in his Satires and Epistles. In dedicating his poem to a unit consisting of a father and two sons, Horace is able to make the father–son relationship a central narrative strand of the Ars Poetica...

... its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like...

... existential, power: in the densely coded, relentlessly violent world of Spenser's poem, learning to read in the precise fashion that a particular text or occasion requires is the means to narrative survival. Its intricacy and immensity may be overwhelming, but they yield a fractal-like distribution...

...This chapter discusses the question of how to represent the orthography of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in modern texts. Editions of Spenser's poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it is The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy...

...This chapter examines the character of Una in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Una was at the epicenter of The Faerie Queene, and the poem's ideal reader was one naturally impervious to any moralizing...

... for exploitation. The invitation Mammon extends to Guyon—to come and see, and to take what pleases him—is an invitation Spenser's poem makes to readers at every turn. And to one schooled in the humanist culture of extraction and imitation, the great obstacle to progress through it might lie not in confusion...

... is not a tightly plotted prose narrative, and its intended reader was no figment of Spenser's imagination. On the contrary, she was a living ruler on whose favor the poet's livelihood depended and to whom, on at least one occasion, he read parts of his uncompleted poem aloud. These well-known facts are related...

... objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic...

...This chapter addresses some of the later psychological dimensions inherent within adolescents' and adults' internalization of a poem. It sets Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” within a very specific institutional and emotional history, directing attention to the mingled pain...

...For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been...

... of the seemingly exclusive bond between reader and text. The realization that someone has already had the response one has to a particular poem or passage can bring a pleasing sense of community. By the same token, the discovery that someone else has read a poem or passage in an utterly different sense than...

...This chapter traces prose poetry's development in nineteenth-century France and its early reception and subsequent critical views about the form. The prose poem in English is now established as an important literary form in many countries at a time when the composition and publication of poetry...

... that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit...

...This examines Anna Akhmatova's two great late poems Requiem (1935–62) and the famously difficult Poem without a Hero (1940–65). In Requiem, Akhmatova embraces her role as a “world-historical personage.” In a sequence of ten lyrics and various...

...Inside “Paradise Lost” opens up new readings and ways of reading John Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. This book demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion...