The book offers a detailed commentary on the poetry of Philip Larkin, exploring the political and cultural contexts which have shaped his contemporary reputation. Part 1, Life and Times, traces Larkin's early years and follows his development, within his career as a university librarian, into one of the most important and popular voices in twentieth-century poetry. Part 2, Artistic Strategies, explores a range of methodologies and aesthetic influences by which Larkin was able to create poe...

This book explores the significance of flight to Romantic literature. Although the Romantic movement and the age of ballooning coincided, there has been a curious and long-time tendency to forget that flight was not impossible during this period. This study details the importance of this new technology to Romantic authors, primarily English Romantic poets. It combines accounts of the exploits and experiences of early balloonists with references to Romantic texts, using ballooning lore to i...

First published in 1983, this books aims to guide Wordsworth students through his difficult masterpiece by reading it in continuous sequence and making its sense emerge. The special value of this commentary is that it explains the structure of The Prelude by encouraging study of the poem as a continuous whole rather than selectively looking at individual sections — an approach that has typified modern criticism of the work. This depends upon a close attention to the careful arrang...

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous...

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened...' Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written. It tells the dreadful tale of Victor Frankenstein, a visionary young student of natural philosophy, who discovers the secret of life. In...

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and m...

"Self-deprecating but delighting . . . a wonderful addition to the Heaney canon—as life-enhancing in its own way as the poems it celebrates." —Andrew Motion, The GuardianNobel Prize–Winning PoetHeaney's ten lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, collected here in The Redress of Poetry, explore the poetry of a wide range of writers, from Christopher Marlowe to John Clare to Oscar Wilde. Whether he conc...

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ is the first part of Holmes’s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Ric...

The Routledge History of Literature in English covers the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, with accompanying language notes which explore the interrelationships between language and literature at each stage. With a span from AD 600 to the present day, it emphasises the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural. Extensive quotations f...

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...

Now appearing in its third edition, Martin Stephen's classic text and course companion to English literature has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of the changes which have occurred in the subject since publication of the second edition.