Long before history began, when Ireland was ruled by poets and tribal chieftains, the prophet Sinnach was the most powerful druid in the ancient province of Mumu. But before he was a prophet, before he was a poet, he was a just boy--a boy whom everyone believed was a girl. Unable to suppress his true nature, Sinnach fled persecution and sought refuge in the wilderness. By his nature, his talents, and his oath to the goddess Ériu, Sinnach came to find his place in a world shaped by poetry, magic, and combat. Yet the attainment of great power is not without consequence. Sinnach is inadvertently entangled in the dangerous affairs of both men and Síd, the Faerie Folk. His perilous travels into the Otherworld, the conflicting passions of love, and the return of an old enemy threaten to endanger his identity, peace between the tribes, and peace between the worlds. Inspired by the great mythological epics of ancient Ireland, this is a new myth that tells very old truths about who we were, who we are, and who we might become.

"Essential writings by Matthew Fox, theologian and leading proponent of "creation spirituality.""--

The memoirs of James Larkin Pearson (1879-1981), the second Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Born in a crude cabin atop Wilkes County's Berry Mountain, James Larkin Pearson was determined to become a poet. He had little formal education, and spent his early years in farming and carpentry. Pearson said he "Worked on the farm till I was 21 years old. Many of my poems were composed as I went about my work on the farm. I always carried my notebook and pencil to the field with me, and as I trudged between the plow-handles in the hot sunshine, my mind was busy working out a poem."In addition to his poetry, Mr. Pearson published The Fool-Killer a successful newspaper that acquired a circulation of some 5,000 readers.On August 4, 1953, Governor William B. Umstead appointed Pearson as the North Carolina Poet Laureate of the State. He held this post until his death, on August 27, 1981.

Blake's two finished epics have been widely regarded as combinations of brilliant set pieces which yield to no systematic rhetorical criticism. Susan Fox contests this view, discovering in Milton an elaborate verbal structure that is fully congruent with the poem's philosophy. She has made the first full exposition of the formal principles of a late Blake poem, and it suggests that the late prophecies are as profound in their artistic structures as they are in their thematic ones. The author begins by tracing throughout Blake's poetry the development of the techniques found in Milton. She then provides an analysis in two chapters organized, as she perceives the poem to be, in parallel three-part units. Her examination reveals the exhaustive parallelism of the poem's books, as well as more local devices such as paired stanzas and circular rhetoric. The rhetorical pattern which emerges raises several major thematic issues which are treated in the concluding chapter. In demonstrating the coherence and control of the intricate formal patterns of Milton, this study provides a new measure of Blake's late verbal art. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.

The book includes over 600 poems by 65 american poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950.

Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry combines close readings of individual poems with a critical consideration of the historical context in which they were written. Informative and original, this book has been carefully designed to enable readers to understand, enjoy, and be inspired by sixteenth-century poetry. Close reading of a wide variety of sixteenth-century poems, canonical and non-canonical, by men and by women, from print and manuscript culture, across the major literary modes and genres Poems read within their historical context, with reference to five major cultural revolutions: Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the modern nation-state, companionate marriage, and the scientific revolution Offers in-depth discussion of Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Isabella Whitney, Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Mary Sidney Herbert, Donne, and Shakespeare Presents a separate study of all five of Shakespeare’s major poems - Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, 'The Phoenix and Turtle,' the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint- in the context of his dramatic career Discusses major works of literary criticism by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Helen Vendler

Through an examination of Tennyson's 'domestic poetry' - his portrayals of England and the English - in their changing nineteenth-century context, this book demonstrates that many of his representations were 'fabrications', more idealized than real, which played a vital part in the country's developing identity and sense of its place in the world.

In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a style and subject matter writing about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate. Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the nature and significance of this tradition as it developed from the fourteenth century to Tudor times, tracing its evolution from one author to the next. This study illuminates the relationships between poets and political power and makes plain the tremendous impact this verse has had on the shape of English literary culture.