Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester and visiting professor at Bolton University. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. He has written poetry, fiction and literary history, and is a translator and anthologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE ...

Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poetsGilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Mi...

The Selected Poem ebooks are a new 'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years.Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anth...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

An essential introduction to the most significant poems and their works since 1900Reproduced within this collection are some of the greatest poems of the 20th century, featuring works from major writers such as T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Langston Hughes and W.B. Yeats. For each, Michael Schmidt provides an insight into their themes and the background to their work, opening for the reader a deeper understanding and enjoyment of these extraordinary poems....

Talking to Stanley on the Telephone rummages through the desires, frustrations and waning faculties of old age. The stories it tells add up to a vivacious celebration of life-spans and the darkening comedy of growing old.

In the late 1970s, as the apartheid government fought a desperate and dirty battle to stay in power, its security forces devised a chilling new tactic. A shadowy, top-secret unit called Delta 40 was established, tasked with the murder of hundreds of ANC, PAC, and SWAPO members. Victims’ bodies were flung from aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean. Based on the detailed analysis of flight logs and numerous interviews, Death Flight sheds shocking new light on one of apartheid’s darkest chapters.

Shadow is a children's picture story about the death/loss of a pet dog named Shadow, and how it affects both children and adults. Emphasis is how it affects a child or children as this is often the first time they learn about death, the death of a dear pet is palpable, and how to help a child or children cope. Grief is real and it is hard for children to cope as they have nothing in which to compare this new loss, thus the focus is on how it affects children and how to help them cope using...

National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistIn this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language.Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon...

A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt*, The First Poets* brings to life for the general reader the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination.Starting with the legendary and possibly mythical Orpheus and with Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, “the dirty old man of poetry,” to Theocritus, the father...

We are living in a time of asynchrony: While technologically we are firmly in the 21st century, our world views are still characterized by ancient legends which are thousands of years old. This combination of high-level technical ability and highly naïve child-like beliefs could have disastrous consequences in the long run. We are behaving like five-year-olds who have been given responsibility for a jumbo jet. One of the most depressing problems of our time lies in religious fundamentalist...

Michael Schmidt’s anthology includes the work of more than a hundred poets from every part of the English-speaking world. What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new.The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times. They have been chosen because they are exceptional, profound and unique in what the...