Edwin Morgan was born in 1920 in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow University where he later taught literature. He is much admired for his experimental writings, his ‘social’ poems, as well as for the diversity of his output. The present book comprises a chapter on Morgan’s early vision poems (which have received scant critical attention hitherto); two on his hodoiporika, The Cape of Good Hope and The New Divan; a chapter on his deployment of the grotesque mode, centred chiefly on the Instamatic Poems and The Whittrick; another on his adaptations of the elegy, in which Edgecombe propose a new genre called the “thanasimon;” and, finally, an examination of his various monologic poems, read in terms of his avowed enterprise of “voicing” the universe. The study is topped by a prologue that sets out the consistency of Morgan’s vision over time, and tailed by an epilogue that connects his various critical pronouncements to his remarkably diverse output.

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.

The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources examines masterpieces of English Romantic poetry and shows the Arabic and Islamic sources that inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron when composing their poems in the eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. Critics have documented Greek and Roman sources but turned a blind eye to nonwestern materials at a time when the romantic poets were reading them. The book shows how the Arabic-Islamic sources had helped the British Romantic Poets not only in finding their own voices, but also their themes, metaphors, symbols, characters and images. The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources is of interest to scholars in English and comparative literature, literary studies, philosophy, religion, government, history, cultural, and Middle Eastern studies and the general public.

Like Wordsworth, Hunt divided his output into loose generic categories when he began preparing a select edition of his poetry toward the end of his life, categories retained and amplified by H. S. Milford in his 1923 edition. Edgecombe has used these divisions as a way of organizing his study, and also of illustrating the immense range of forms and genres that the poet explored in the course of a long career.

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.

This edition contains a complete and authoritative text of Coleridge's poems. Here are his earliest extant teenage poems, his masterly meditative pieces, and the extraordinary "Kubla Khan", "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", and "Christabel". The poems are printed, so far as possible, in chronological order, with Coleridge's own notes as well as textual and bibliographical notes by the editor.