In 1753 Robert Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Sponsored by Horace Walpole, this luxurious quarto was the first major aesthetic expression of the Strawberry Hill circle and a landmark in English book illustration. Kenneth Clarke called it "the most graceful monument to Gothic Rococo." Its witty interplay between illustration and text anticipated Blake, who studied it some thirty years later. Among its poems is Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Courtly Church-Yard. Loftus Jestin offers a facsimile of Designs (out of print since 1786) and a full-length interdisciplinary study of the collaboration of Bentley, Gray, and Walpole that produced this extraordinary book. He shows the way poems and illustration at once complement, compete with and invigorate each other, and he examines Strawberry Hill. Walpole's house at Twickenham, where Bentley's genius flourished. He also considers the interplay of the sister arts in the work of Hogarth, Kent, and Pine, and surveys the tastes, friendships, economics, and politics that helped shape the development of Bentley's book illustrations.

Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern poetry—including its proximity to popular song, hallowed objecthood, and seeming autonomy from historical determination—this revisionary theory of lyric presents a new history of modern US poetry as one sonorous practice among many clamorous others. Focusing on the mid-twentieth century, Kilbane traces the impact of new sound technologies on a diverse array of literary and musical works by Lorine Niedecker, Harry Partch, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Sterling Brown, John Wheelwright, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Russell Atkins, and Helen Adam. Kilbane shows how literary critics can look to media history to illuminate poetry's social life, and how media scholars can read poetry for insight into the cultural history of technology. In this book, the lyric poem emerges as a sensitive barometer of technological change.

Work in the humanities by undergraduate students of Carthage College

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.