Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Ivan Arguelles is a poet who does not mine the general American vein of didactic or 'therapeutic' poetry that is supposed to be of use in some way. What he creates is an expansive romantic/surrealist summoning of multiple, swarming worlds and histories. This makes him one of the most authentic poets working in English today, and one of the most beautiful in his use of language. His voice is unique, but each of his books has its own timbre, point of view; its own movement and thematic centers. In ORPHIC CANTOS, those centers revolve around the paradoxes of language and consciousness, which are understood to be at the very marrow of the human. The nature of his engagement over the past 40 years has been far more than a desire to write 'poetry'; rather, poetry is the embodiment of a complex psychic need, the air he needs to be in the life form and time he occupies. When you read Arguelles' work, you are immersed in the basic human experience. His work is a great treasure." John M. Bennett"

Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies. This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.

There is hardly a more controversial issue in the study of ancient religion than Orphism. More than two centuries of debate have not closed the subject, since new evidence and divergent approaches have kept appearing regularly. This volume sheds light on the most relevant pieces of evidence for ancient Orphism, collected in the recent edition by Alberto Bernabé. It contains 65 short new studies on Orphic fragments by leading international scholars who comment one of the most controversial phenomena in Antiquity from a plurality of perspectives. Readers will acquire a global vision of the multiple dimensions of the Orphic tradition, as well as many new insights into particular Orphic fragments.

The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.

Twentieth-Century Metapoetry and the Lyric Tradition reveals the unique value of metapoems for exploring twentieth-century poetry. By placing these texts into a hitherto barely investigated literary-historical perspective, it demonstrates that modern metapoetry is steeped in the lyric tradition to a much greater extent than previously acknowledged. Since these literary continuities that cut across epochal boundaries can be traced across all major poetic movements, they challenge established accounts of the history of twentieth-century poetry that postulate a radical break with the (immediate) past. Moreover, the finding that metapoems perpetuate traditional forms and topoi distinguishes metapoetry historically and systematically from metafiction and metadrama. After highlighting the most important differences as regards to the function of metareference in poetry on the one side, and in fiction and drama on the other, the book concludes with a discussion of how to account for these generic differences theoretically. With its "extraordinarily subtle and perceptive" (Ronald Bush, St. John's College, Oxford) interpretive readings of over one hundred metapoems by canonical anglophone authors, it offers the first representative selection of twentieth-century poems about poetry in English.

A wondrously written book of literary criticism and philosophy that maps the relationship between poetry and natural history, connecting verse from poets such as Shakespeare and Rainer Maria Rilke to the work of scientists and theorists like Francis Bacon and Michael Polanyi. Taking its bearings from the Greek myth of Orpheus, whose singing had the power to move the rocks and trees and to quiet the animals, Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice transforms our understanding of the relationship between mind and nature. Myth, Sewell argues, is not mere fable but an ancient and vital form of reflection that unites poetry, philosophy, and natural science: Shakespeare with Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico; Wordsworth and Rilke with Michael Polanyi. All these members of the Orphic company share a common perception that “discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means toward understanding the world.” Sewell’s visionary book, first published in 1960, presents brilliantly illuminating readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, among other masterpieces, while deepening our understanding not only of poetry and the history of ideas but of the biological reach of the mind.

In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.