Tome (tm) n. Fr

An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature. From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature. Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s. In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.

Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds. Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers. The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.

Collects the poetic works of the Chilean author, including works of prose poetry, fiction in verse, and pieces that defy categorization.

Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself a poet and painter, soon recognized her genius and urged her to publish her poems. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Although she is regarded as the greatest woman poet of the Victorian period, there has not been until now and authoritative edition of her poetry. In this second volume of the three-volume The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, R.W. Crump continues the editorial standards she established n Volume I, published in 1979. She gives the reader a comprehensive text with notes revealing Christina’s process of composition and revision and her painstaking concern for the technical details of her work. The variant readings in the notes are taken from extant manuscripts, individual poems as published or privately printed before being incorporated into her published collections, and all the English and American editions of her poems through William Michael Rossetti’s The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904). A special feature of both Volumes I and II is a complete list of holographs and their locations. Volume II contains Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893), as well as the poems added to these volumes after their original publication. Volume III contains poems Christina published but did not include in any of her collections as well as poems that have not previously appeared in print.