Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838) was one of the leading women poets of the second generation of English Romantic writers. Following her predecessor Walter Scott and her contemporary Lord Byron, she was a fluent practitioner and essential innovator of the metrical romance and exerted a strong influence on the work of Victorian poets (especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti). This book analyses Landon's poetics, with particular reference to the close relationship between the narrative poem as literary genre and its gender implications. Landon was both an eclectic writer and a literary businesswoman: she was an extremely effective promoter of her literary work in order to support her independent life in London. Furthermore she was the editor of several annuals and gift-books, wrote for magazines, and published numerous poems, novels, and editorials. Her active life and mysterious and premature death in Africa attracted the curiosity of many biographers during the twentieth century, but only in recent times has critical attention been paid to her rich literary output. This volume aims to discuss and analyse the work of a talented artist whose metrical romance strongly influenced the poetics of late Romanticism, and prefigured a highly successful genre widely adopted during the Victorian age: the dramatic monologue.

Now in its 2nd edition, this guide helps students build the knowledge and tools needed to tackle poetry with confidence.

The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry brings together the most remarkable verse written in the British Isles over the course of the past twelve centuries, offering the greatest diversity of poetic voices in any anthology of its kind. From Shakespeare's memorable sonnets to Keats's haunting odes to T.S. Eliot's mediations on the conditions of modern life, the collection contains many of the best-loved treasures of British poetry. Longer and much-celebrated poems that rarely find their way into anthologies-including Pope's "Rape of the Lock" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"-claim a place in this collection. Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Felicia Hemans are among dozens of women writers renowned in their own day and now restored to their rightful prominence. Scottish, Welsh, and Irish poets often excluded from anthologies of British poetry are here as well, including such extraordinary voices as Lady Grisell Baillie, Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Seamus Heaney. The finest contemporary poets are fully represented also, from Thom Gunn to Eavan Boland. The result is an amazingly rich and wide-ranging conversation among British poets that transcends the boundaries of time and place. Carl Woodring and James Shapiro, the team scholars who edited The Columbia History of British Poetry, have written incisive introductions to the careers of the poets, making this the most accessible and comprehensive anthology of British verse in print. Covering the new and the ancient, the classic and the rediscovered, this generous volume reimagines the horizons of British poetry.