Member of Parliament, tutor to Oliver Cromwell's ward, satirist and friend of John Milton, Andrew Marvell was one of the most interesting and important poets of the seventeenth century. The Complete Poems demonstrates his unique skill and immense diversity to the full, and includes lyrical love-poetry, religious works and biting satire. From the passionately erotic To his Coy Mistress, to the astutely political Cromwellian poems and the profoundly spiritual On a Drop of Dew, in which he considers the nature of the soul, these works are masterpieces of clarity and metaphysical imagery. Eloquent and compelling, they remain among the most vital and profound works of the era - works by a figure who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, speaks clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age'.

Even as worship wars in the church and music controversies in society at large continue to rage, many people do not realize that conflict over music goes back to the earliest Christians as they sought to live out the "new song" of their faith. In A New Song for an Old World Calvin Stapert challenges contemporary Christians to learn from the wisdom of the early church in the area of music. Stapert draws parallels between the pagan cultures of the early Christian era and our own multicultural realities, enabling readers to comprehend the musical ideas of early Christian thinkers, from Clement and Tertullian to John Chrysostom and Augustine. Stapert's expert treatment of the attitudes of the early church toward psalms and hymns on the one hand, and pagan music on the other, is ideal for scholars of early Christianity, church musicians, and all Christians seeking an ancient yet relevant perspective on music in their worship and lives today.

Celebrated practitioners speak on the creative, critical, political, and historical aspects of their work.

Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkinbreak that critical silence to readdress some of thefundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies. Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme,the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, theconnections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essaystake on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing. A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into the discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology.

A collection of ten original critical and historical essays on the life and art of Crashaw (1612/13-1649), one of the most neglected, misunderstood and unappreciated of the major metaphysical poets. The introduction surveys the history of Crashavian criticism and signals new directions for future scholarship. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God -- among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense -- and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance and a unique effort to weave a new fabric of connection between God and creation.

Addressing a gap in Shelley studies, Jessica K. Quillin explores the poet's lifelong interest in music. Quillin connects the trope of music with Shelley's larger formal aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns, showing that music offers a new critical lens through which to view such familiar Shelleyan concerns as the status of the poetic, figural language, and the philosophical problem posed by idealism versus skepticism. Quillin's book uncovers the implications of Shelley's use of music by means of four musico-poetic concerns: the inherently interdisciplinary nature of musical imagery and figurative language; the rhythmic and sonoric dimensions of poetry; the extension of poetry into the performative realms of the theatre and drawing room through close links between most poetic genres and music; and the transformation of poetry into music through the setting and adaptation of poetic lyrics to music. Ultimately, Quillin argues, Shelley exhibits a fundamental recognition of an interdependence between music and poetry which is expressed in the form and content of his highly sonorous works. Equating music with love allows him to create a radical model in which poetry is the highest form of imaginative expression, one that can affect the mind and the senses at once and potentially bring about the perfectibility of mankind through a unique mode of visionary experience.