Explores the question: How do poems end? This work examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem.

Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure of the Empire in Flavian Rome. Overall, this volume offers a new tool for studying literary endings through ritual, which promotes our understanding of Flavian culture and politics as well as creating a new perception of the use of religion and ritual in Flavian literature: instead of giving a sense of closure, this volume argues that ritual is a medium to increase complexity, to expose ritual actors and to project a generic riskiness of ritual actors also onto the epic actors who are acting before and mostly after a ritual scene.

An essential handbook for literary studies The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts, genres, forms, movements, and poetic elements, followed by invaluable, up-to-date bibliographies that guide users to further reading and research. Because the entries are carefully selected and adapted from the Princeton Encyclopedia, the Handbook has unrivalled breadth and depth for a book of its kind, in a convenient, portable size. Fully indexed for the first time and complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for all literature students, teachers, and researchers, as well as other readers and writers. Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Provides 226 fully updated and authoritative entries, including 100 new to this edition, written by an international team of leading scholars Features entries on critical concepts (canon, mimesis, prosody, syntax); genres, forms, and movements (ballad, blank verse, confessional poetry, ode); and terms (apostrophe, hypotaxis and parataxis, meter, tone) Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a full index

In this comparative study of Chinese poetic closure, Yang Ye focuses on a «scenic ending» that presents an image rather than a statement of thought, as exemplified in the poetry of High T'ang poets like Tu Fu. Chinese Poetic Closure places the development of poetic structure in the Chinese tradition since the ancient anthology, The Book of Songs, and explores the underlying poetics of incompleteness and suggestiveness. In the light of the explication of Western texts (Du Bellay, Hölderlin, and Shelley) and an examination of early reception of Chinese poetry in the West, Ye reflects on fundamental differences between Chinese and Western poetry and poetics.

What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.

An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts.

This book, first published in 1997, offers an approach to researching human behavior relating details of interaction to social structure.

On Biblical Poetry takes a fresh look at the nature of biblical Hebrew poetry beyond its currently best-known feature, parallelism. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp argues that biblical poetry is in most respects just like any other verse tradition, and therefore biblical poems should be read and interpreted like other poems, using the same critical tools and with the same kinds of guiding assumptions in place. He offers a series of programmatic essays on major facets of biblical verse, each aspiring to alter currently regnant conceptualizations in the field and to show that attention to aspects of prosody--rhythm, lineation, and the like--allied with close reading can yield interesting, valuable, and even pleasurable interpretations. What distinguishes the verse of the Bible, says Dobbs-Allsopp, is its historicity and cultural specificity, those peculiar encrustations and encumbrances that typify all human artifacts. Both the literary and the historical, then, are in view throughout. The concluding essay elaborates a close reading of Psalm 133. This chapter enacts the final movement to the set of literary and historical arguments mounted throughout the volume--an example of the holistic staging which, Dobbs-Allsopp argues, is much needed in the field of Biblical Studies.