A globe-spanning, never-before-told epic history of the garden—from antiquity to presentGardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing humans both to return to nature and to tame it. Avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens across four millennia and explores their enduring influence on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, gardens a...

An illuminating and authoritative study of the 20th-century English poet and children's writer's life and work.Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship,...

Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol ...

“One man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages.”In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.Here is the author as...

A globe-spanning, never-before-told epic history of the garden—from antiquity to presentGardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing humans both to return to nature and to tame it. Avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens across four millennia and explores their enduring influence on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, gardens a...

"A fascinating insight into a man for whom poetry was, like his life, a mixture of discord and harmony." — Independent on SundayJohn Clare (1793–1864) is the greatest laboring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography.Here at last is his f...

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatr...

First published in 1991, Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet’s politics were fundamentally ‘green’. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerf...

Emmy's Frenzy is a novel set on the shores of Lake Erie in 1947. Emmy Brooks has given up her dream of figure skating in the Olympics after the death of her mother. She and her brother Matt run the family-owned Bohemian Cafe and Hotel while caring for their mentally incapable younger brother Paul and their emotionally distraught father, Tom.The novel is about the unpredictable flow of life and the dramatic events that have shaped their world. They live an intricate, insular existen...

The story of a man searching for a new identity, living on a boat high and dry in the yard, in a town very much like Port Cypress, Washington.There, he becomes tied to a boatyard community of like souls. These widely divergent characters find in each other the catalyst to move on from their personal doldrums to a new sense of purpose.

In this vivid and engaging work, Eric Toensmeier entices us with his journey as an example, explaining what to do, and what mistakes to avoid, to develop our own versions of an edible urban paradise.”—Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s GardenWhen Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and bric...