Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.") A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date. Widely celebrated as the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was also, as George Steiner observed, “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath.” Hugely prolific, Brecht also wrote more than two thousand poems—though fewer than half were published in his lifetime, and early translations were heavily censored. Now, award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn have heroically translated more than 1,200 poems in the most comprehensive English collection of Brecht’s poetry to date. Written between 1913 and 1956, these poems celebrate Brecht’s unquenchable “love of life, the desire for better and more of it,” and reflect the technical virtuosity of an artist driven by bitter and violent politics, as well as by the untrammeled forces of love and erotic desire. A monumental achievement and a reclamation, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is a must-have for any lover of twentieth-century poetry.

The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume One, surveys the lives and writings of nearly 400 Midwestern authors and identifies some of the most important criticism of their writings. The Dictionary is based on the belief that the literature of any region simultaneously captures the experience and influences the worldview of its people, reflecting as well as shaping the evolving sense of individual and collective identity, meaning, and values. Volume One presents individual lives and literary orientations and offers a broad survey of the Midwestern experience as expressed by its many diverse peoples over time.Philip A. Greasley's introduction fills in background information and describes the philosophy, focus, methodology, content, and layout of entries, as well as criteria for their inclusion. An extended lead-essay, "The Origins and Development of the Literature of the Midwest," by David D. Anderson, provides a historical, cultural, and literary context in which the lives and writings of individual authors can be considered.This volume is the first of an ambitious three-volume series sponsored by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and created by its members. Volume Two will provide similar coverage of non-author entries, such as sites, centers, movements, influences, themes, and genres. Volume Three will be a literary history of the Midwest. One goal of the series is to build understanding of the nature, importance, and influence of Midwestern writers and literature. Another is to provide information on writers from the early years of the Midwestern experience, as well as those now emerging, who are typically absent from existing reference works.

Ekphrasis, the description of pictorial art in words, is the subject of this bibliography. More specifically, some 2500 poems on paintings are catalogued, by type of publication in which they appear and by poet. Also included are 2000 entries on the secondary literature of ekphrasis, including works on sculpture, music, photography, film, and mixed media.

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

Rivers of Thought, first published in 1959, is a small book of verses and poems written by the late Martin Buxbaum, who was best known for his publication of ‘Table Talk’ with the Marriott Hot Shoppes restaurants. When the world has become so stressful, sometimes thoughts forever stand to give us comfort. Rivers of Thought is a book that can easily be put in a pocket or a purse, to draw some peace from. Almost sixty years after his thoughts were written, they remain a river of comfort to all who read them.

In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, RobertLowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, RandallJarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholedand therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rareexplicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evadedthe notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the privatenature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, andBerryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence.Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisanotraces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic anddefines its continuing influence on Americanpoetry. The refusal of this "midcentury quartet,"as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with theirintuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project.Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their ownaesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encounteredsignificant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John CroweRansom, and Marianne Moore. Jarrell, whom othersof the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as apost-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest knownuse of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six yearslater, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use ofpastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson asspecifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt aself-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challengingforms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, andsestina. Each of these poets suffered adevastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disastersof the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. Thecontinual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing sosharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redrawthe map of postwar American poetry.

The 13th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Contents: * Each entry provides full career history and publication details * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.

This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914–2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914–1972), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry. From their first meeting as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the early 1930s, Giroux and Berryman became lifelong friends and publishing partners. Patrick Samway received unprecedented access to Giroux’s letters and essays. By incorporating either sections or whole letters of the correspondence between Berryman and Giroux into this book, Samway makes available for the first time a historical account of their relationship, including revealing portraits of their personal lives. As Giroux edited over a dozen books by Berryman, his letters to the poet were often filled with editorial details and pertinent observations, emanating from his genuine affection for his friend, whose talent he never doubted, even as Berryman endured prolonged periods of hospitalization due to his alcoholism. Giroux gave Berryman the greatest gift he could: sustained encouragement to continue writing without trying to manipulate or discourage him in any way. But Giroux also had a deep-seated secret desire to surpass the essays written about Shakespeare by Berryman, as well as the book on Shakespeare written by their mutual professor Mark Van Doren. Giroux’s volume, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was finally published in 1982. Samway’s fascinating account of a gifted but troubled poet and his devoted yet conflicted editor will interest fans of Berryman and all readers and students of American poetry.