First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book. For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, "Sunday Times"

Presents a comprehensive A-to-Z reference with approximately 400 entries providing facts about British poets and their poetry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Reveals myth and “otherness” as keys to restoring self, nature, and society • Shows how myths contain medicine to restore wholeness amidst trauma, exile, sudden life change, disability, illness, death, or grief • Synthesizes lessons from shamanic practice, quantum physics, alchemy, soul poetry, wildness, social justice, and the author’s lived experience • Discloses the blessings of outsiderhood and the gifts and insights gained and contributed to culture by those who are marginalized and outcast There is an “other” that lives within each of us, an exiled part that carries wisdom needed for ourselves and the culture at large. Having survived disabling polio as an infant, Daniel Deardorff knows the oppressions of exclusion and outsiderhood. He guides readers on an initiatory journey through ancient myth, literature, and personal revelation to discover our own true identity. These 10,000-year-old stories contain sacred medicine with insights that release imagination and restore wholeness amid trauma, exile, climate chaos, disability, illness, death, and grief. Illustrating how archetypal figures of the Other--the Trickster, Daimon, Not-I, etc.--hold paradox, Deardorff teaches us to reframe disparities of self/other, civilization/ wilderness, form/deformity and transform the experience of being outcast. Synthesizing lessons from shamanic practice, quantum physics, alchemy, social justice, and his own lived experience, Deardorff affirms the disruptive and transgressive forces that break through dogma, conventionality, and prejudice. He discloses blessings of outsiderhood and gifts to culture by those who are marginalized. Through mythmaking (mythopoesis), the experience of Otherness--cultural, racial, religious, sexual, physiognomic--becomes one of empowerment, a catalyst for human liberation.