These are crazy poems written by a high school kid in the 1960s. They are mostly crap, but they are amusing sometimes.

Discusses the themes of the male body, war, and homosexual love in poetry, and analyzes the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Thom Gunn.

Studying Poetry is a fun, concise and helpful guide to understanding poetry which is divided into three parts, form and meaning, critical approaches and interpreting poetry, all of which help to illuminate the beauty and validity of poetry using a wide variety of examples, from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan.

Whereas Thomas Hood has long been regarded as a minor comic poet, this book--the first to devote itself exclusively to his verse--provides a detailed analysis of two "serious" poems ("Hero and Leander" and "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies") so as to give a better sense of his range. Most commentators have pointed to the influence of Keats on such occasions, but close examination reveals an even greater debt to Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, whose sometimes playful deployment of the conceit struck a chord in his sensibility. At the same time, the book gives Hood's comic genius its due, supplying detailed accounts of the deftness and panache of his light-hearted oeuvre. One chapter examines his excursion into the mock-heroic mode (Odes and Addresses to Great People), and another his reliance on that airiest of forms, the capriccio (Whims and Oddities). The study concludes with an extensive examination of "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg," showing how Hood was here able to inflect a jeu d'esprit with a fine Juvenalian passion.

Beddoes poses a peculiar problem for critics and scholars who wish to redress the marginal position that he occupies in the Romantic canon – a problem seemingly unique to him, and created in part by his misconception of his own strengths as a writer. An extremely good poet who, had things turned out differently, might have functioned as a missing link between Keats and Tennyson, he fatally divided his attention between verse and medicine, a discipline that by his own admission (made in the poem composed for Zoë King) served to wither his creative gift. This fission of energy was bad enough, but more damaging still was his misconception of metier, for whatever mental resources remained to Beddoes after gruelling days in the classroom he invested in writing an unstageable drama instead of in his primary gift for lyric verse. Whereas the Beddoes revival that has been gathering momentum in recent years has centred on Death's Jest-Book, the play onto which the poet directed – some might say ‘misdirected’ – so much of his creative energy, this study focuses wholly on his lyric and narrative verse, much of which has received short critical shrift. It follows the sequence of poems set out in the Donner edition, and focuses on their verbal richness and inventiveness as they unspool upon the page.

W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his friends to burn his letters at his death, but, against that, Auden himself often reviewed literary biographies and normally with enthusiasm. Moreover he argued for biographies of writers such as Dryden, Trollope, Wagner and Gerard Manley Hopkins as their lives would tell us something about their art. Humphrey Carpenter himself nicely summarizes Auden's ambiguity on this question. 'Here (referring to literary biography), as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted.' Although the biography was not authorized it did receive the co-operation of the Auden Estate which gave permission for letters and unpublished works to be quoted. The result is a biography that was widely praised on first publication in 1981 and which continues to hold its own. Now is the obvious time to reissue it with the character of Humphrey Carpenter playing an important role in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. In his introduction Alan Bennett writes 'When I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter and both are models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play.' 'Carpenter is a model biographer - diligent, unspeculative, sympathetic, and extremely good at finding out what happened when and with whom . . . admirably detailed and researched study.' John Bayley, The Listener 'an illuminating book; full of information, unobtrusively affectionate, it describes with unpretentious elegance the curve of a great poet's life and work' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'sharpens and usually lights up even the most canvassed parts of the Auden life and myth . . . a deeply interesting book about a deeply interesting life' Roy Fuller, Sunday Times ' . . . the story of a remarkable man told by one of the best living biographers' David Cecil, Book Choice

Duggan was for many years in the 1930s and 1940s the best known poet in New Zealand, but recently has been almost unacknowledged and most of her work is now out of print. She is important in Catholic and New Zealand Irish writing. Her lyrical gift and her evocation of atmosphere was very popular at the time she was writing, so this volume serves as an example of that phase of poetry's development. This selection, which was published on the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth, contains work from her five published books of poetry, plus 37 previously unpublished poems and 12 items of prose. The editor, who has provided an introduction, is a lecturer in English at the Victoria University of Wellington.

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

This book provides an introduction to the elements of poetry, formulates a series of contexts for the interpretation of poems, and offers a substantial anthology. Its purpose is to enable students to read poems with understanding and pleasure and to provide them with a basic vocabulary for analysing and talking about poems.

The second of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the second volume of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume follows Auden as a mature artist, containing all the poems that he published or submitted for publication from 1940 until his death in 1973, at age sixty-six. This includes all his poetry collections from this period, from The Double Man (1941) through Epistle to a Godson (1972). The volume also features an edited version of his incomplete, posthumous book Thank You, Fog, as well as his self-designated “posthumous” poems. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The first volume of this edition, Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, is also available.