A collection of revised and expanded writings culled from the author's popular Washington Post Book World "Poet's Choice" column demonstrates how poetry responds to world challenges and introduces the work of more than 130 writers.

How did nineteenth-century poets negotiate the complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes--lyric and narrative? Narrative Means, Lyric Ends examines the solutions offered by four canonical long poems: William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Lord Byron's Don Juan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. Monique Morgan argues that each of these texts uses narrative techniques to create lyrical effects, effects that manipulate readers' experience of time and shape their intellectual, emotional, and ethical responses. To highlight the productive tension between the modes, Morgan defines narrative as essentially temporal and sequential, and lyric as creating an illusion of simultaneity. The poems reinforce their larger narrative strategies, she suggests, with their figurative language. Through her readings of these texts, Morgan questions lyric's brevity and associability, interrogates retrospection's importance for narrative, examines the gendered implications of several genres, and determines the dramatic monologue's temporal structure. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends offers four case studies of the interactions between broad modes and among specific genres, changes our aesthetic and ideological assumptions about lyric and narrative, expands the domain of narratology, and advocates a renewed formalism.

“Poems of Peace” is a 1909 collection of poetry by British writer James Allen. Contents include: “Buddha”, “If Men Only Understood”, “Practice and Perception”, “Liberty”, “Long I Sought Thee”, “Reality”, “To-morrow and To-day”, “Star of Wisdom”, “Would you Scale the Highest Heaven”, “To Them That Seek the Highest Good”, “One Thing Lacking”, “Yashas”, “The Lowly Way”, “The Music of the Sea”, “Love's Conquest”, etc. This wonderful collection will appeal to all lovers of the form and is not to be missed by fans of Allen's seminal work. James Allen (1864–1912) was a British writer most famous for his inspirational poetry and being an early leader of the self-help movement. “As a Man Thinketh” (1903), his best known work, has been a significant source of inspiration for many self-help authors. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with an essay by Henry Thomas Hamblin.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities. “Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.” —Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

Companion to the Book of Literary Terms, an indispensable handbook, revised and updated for today's users.

Kids love Kenn Nesbitt's hilarious poetry! With their rollicking rhythms, playful rhymes, and mischievous twists, kids can't stop reading these poems. The Armpit of Doom includes seventy new poems about crazy characters, funny families, peculiar pets, comical creatures, and much, much more.

You might think poetry can't be taught, at least can't be learned from a book. You might be right or you might be wrong. You'll never know if you don't look. (RC) Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Whitman's famous poem, accompanied by linoleum-cut illustrations, depicts people at work all over an earlier America.