Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

The first English translation of Jean Paulhan's major essays

Erkkila's aim is to repair the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political and the poet and the history that has governed the analysis and evaluation of Whitman and his work in the past.

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

Baal and the Politics of Poetry provides a thoroughly new interpretation of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle that simultaneously inaugurates an innovative approach to studying ancient Near Eastern literature within the political context of its production. The book argues that the poem, written in the last decades of the Bronze Age, takes aim at the reigning political-theological norms of its day and uses the depiction of a divine world to educate its audience about the nature of human politics. By attuning ourselves to the specific historical context of this one poem, we can develop more nuanced appreciation of how poetry, politics, and religion have interacted—in antiquity, and beyond.

Throughout the last year and a half of his life, Allen Ginsberg phoned many of his poet friends to ask if they had any social verses opposing America's rightwing drift or otherwise speaking their current political minds. This volume presents the perceptive and visionary poems that Ginsberg collected (with selections based on his notes), and also includes writings from contributors to "Planet News," an historic tribute to Allen Ginsberg that was held at New York City's St. John the Divine Cathedral in May 1998.

Situating the politics of invention at the intersection of politics, law, and technology, Gispen (U. of Mississippi) describes how it occupied German inventors, industrial scientists, patent experts, business executives, and sometimes even the country's political leaders for the better part of a century. The issue they grappled with, and which he takes up here, is what rights inventors are due in the age of corporate capitalism. He invokes various realms of the computer industry to point out that the issue has not yet been settled. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

A powerful and persuasive new reading of Frost as a poet deeply engaged with both the literary and public politics of his day.

'It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object - the very poetry of politics. Only think - a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.' So wrote Lord Byron in his journal, in February 1821, only days before the outbreak of revolution in Greece, where three years later he would die in the service of the revolutionary cause. For a poet whose life and work are interlaced with action of multiple sorts, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Byron's engagement with issues of politics. This volume brings together the work of eminent Byronists from seven European countries and the USA to re-assess the evidence. What did Byron mean by the 'poetry of politics'? Was he, in any sense, a 'political animal'? Can his final, fateful involvement in Greece be understood as the culmination of earlier, more deeply rooted quests? The first part of the book examines the implications of reading and writing as themselves political acts; the second interrogates the politics inherent or implied in Byron's poems and plays; the third follows the trajectory of his political engagement (or non-engagement), from his abortive early career in the British House of Lords, via the Peninsular War in Spain to his involvement in revolutionary politics abroad.

"This is the best study of a single Chinese poet I have seen in decades. And the best study of Du Fu known to me. David Schneider goes beyond previous works in revealing what might be called the source of Du Fu's gravitas. What is especially refreshing is that the author, while making use of well-selected modern authorities to cast light on Du Fu's poetry, is equally careful never to embrace their "theories" fully, with the ancillary danger of anachronism which taints so much contemporary "humanities" scholarship. The combination of empathy and critical thinking here is exemplary. The author writes eloquently and clearly, and is a very fine translator indeed, and gives us some of the very finest translations of Du Fu we now possess." - Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University