This book offers new essays on the pastoral tradition. Both critical revision and consideration of pastoral's future, Poetics and Politics of Place in Pastoral: International Perspectives investigates the genre's persistent attraction in a time of environmental crisis.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague -- Chapter 2: "The God in the Tree" : Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition -- Chapter 3: "Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place " : Michael Longley's Environmental Elegies -- Chapter 4: Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land: Eavan Boland's Suburban Pastoral -- Chapter 5: "In My Handerkerchief of a Garden" : Medbh McGuckian's Miniature Pastoral Retreats -- Chapter 6: "When Ireland Was Still under a Spell" : Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill -- Conclusion: The Future of Pastoral -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Loving cows, then killing them. The relation with cattle in Mursi country is shaped by the dichotomy between the value given to it during life and the death imposed upon it. The killing of cattle may be brief and inflicted with few words, but it is preceded by a series of intense aesthetic practices, such as body painting and adornments, colour poetics, poems and oratory art. This book investigates the link between the nurturing and killing of cattle with Mursi daily life and finds that these rituals cut across pastoralism, social organisation and politics in forming the very fabric of Mursi society.

How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

This collaborative, interdisciplinary study explores a variety of issues in theatrical and literary history that converge in two performances given at the palace of Fontainebleau on 13 February 1564. Part of the fabled Fêtes de Fontainebleau, this carnival Sunday entertainment was produced at the behest of Catherine de Médicis and created by courtiers and artists including Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest lyric poet of the French sixteenth century. While focused on the text and production of Ronsard's Bergerie and the choice and production of the tale of Ginevra from Ariosto's Orlando furioso, the study also examines the urgent circumstances of the festival - the moment, shortly after the end of the First War of Religion, was critical and highly charged - as well as its political program and the rhetorical strategies employed by Catherine and Ronsard to promote harmony among the opposing factions of nobles. The authors' exploration of the Queen's Day also leads them to consider a range of questions pertaining to Renaissance and early modern court performance practices and literary-cultural traditions. The book is distinctive in that it crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, and in that a number of the issues it addresses have received little or no previous scholarly attention.

W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call "the modernist predicament." Yeats's articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeats's "imaginative nationalism." Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poet's consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeats's politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims to trace the development or, better still, radicalization of Yeats's political thought, especially with regard to modernity and the Enlightenment.

One of America’s most celebrated poets challenges us with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart. For more than fifty years, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has dazzled and inspired readers. As sharp and outspoken as ever, she returns with this profound book of poetry in which she continues to call attention to injustice and racism, celebrate Black culture and Black lives, and and give readers an unfiltered look into her own experiences. In Make Me Rain, she celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her Black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. Giovanni reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as “I Come from Athletes” and “Rainy Days”—calling out segregation and Donald Trump; as well as “Unloved (for Aunt Cleota)” and “”When I Could No Longer”—her personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive home life. Stirring, provocative, and resonant, the poems in Make Me Rain pierce the heart and nourish the soul.

Excerpt from English Pastoral PoetryMany eople, without being communists, have irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics, the bourge01s themselves do not like literature to have too much bourgeois ideology' And yet what is said 1s one of the permanent truths; 1t is only 111 deg rce that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in 1nt1macy, cannot but be felt deeply, and IS the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is certainly non political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way bour geois, like this one; they suggest to many readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even m degree. This at least shows that the distinction the communists try to draw is a puzzling one; two people may get very different experiences from the same work of art without either being definitely wrong. One is told that the Russ1ans now disapprove of tragedy, and that there was a per formance of Hamlet in the turk-sib region which the audience decided spontaneously was a farce. They may well hold out against the melancholy of old Russia, and for them there may be dangerous implications in any tragedy, which other people do not see. I am sure at any rate that one could not estimate the amount of bourgeois ideology really in the verse from Gray.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.