"In this original study of Elizabeth Bishop's lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishop's writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishop's religious upbringing with her agnostic stance and that has until now escaped thorough examination." "To make her case, Corelle immerses the reader in Bishop's works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poet's dialogue with historical Christianity and its literature. At the heart of that engagement are some compelling peculiarities. Bishop was a self-proclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes, and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant." "This study illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literature - allegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiography - advanced her own poetic purposes."--BOOK JACKET.

Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Beginning with an essay on the history and theory of poetic argument, he traces its patterns through Romantic and Modernist literature. He divides his subject into three areas: the paradoxes of reason, language, and argument. Poetic Argument surveys the writings of the five poets in light of what has to be "proved" and identifies the characteristic styles of proof for each. For example, in the chapter on Marianne Moore, Kertzer studies two expressions of poetic argument. The first regards poetry as a waking dream, combining the powers of sleep and calculation. The second, derived from Imagism, treats poetry as a special way of seeing. Kertzer suggests that the combination of these two elements produces Moore's characteristically intricate, but inconclusive, forms of argument.

Elizabeth Bishop is increasingly recognised as one of the twentieth century's most original writers. Consisting of thirty-five ground-breaking essays by an international team of authors, including biographers, literary critics, poets and translators, this volume addresses the biographical and literary inception of Bishop's originality, from her formative upbringing in New England and Nova Scotia to long residences in New York, France, Florida and Brazil. Her poetry, prose, letters, translations and visual art are analysed in turn, followed by detailed studies of literary movements such as surrealism and modernism that influenced her artistic development. Bishop's encounters with nature, music, psychoanalysis and religion receive extended treatment, likewise her interest in dreams and humour. Essays also investigate the impact of twentieth-century history and politics on Bishop's life writing, and what it means to read Bishop via eco-criticism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.

In Romantic Interactions, Susan J. Wolfson examines how interaction with other authors—whether on the bookshelf, in the embodied company of someone else writing, or in relation to literary celebrity—shaped the work of some of the best-known (and less well-known) writers in the English language. Working across the arc of Long Romanticism, from the 1780s to the 1840s, this lively study involves writing by women and men, in poetry and prose. Combining careful readings with sophisticated literary, historical, and cultural criticism, Wolfson reveals how various writers came to define themselves as “author.” The story unfolds not only in deft textual analyses but also by provocatively placing writers in dialogue with what they were reading, with one another, and with the community of readers (and writers) their writings helped bring into being: Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in the Revolution-roiled 1790s; William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth in the society of the Lake District; Lord Byron, a magnet for writers everywhere, inspired, troubled, but always arrested by what he (and his scandal-ridden celebrity) represented. This fresh, informative account of key writers, important texts, and complex cultural currents promises keen interest for students and scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians.

William Wordsworth's poem 'The Prelude' is a fascinating work, both as an autobiography and as a fragment of historical evidence from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years. This volume gathers together 13 essays on 'The Prelude', and is useful as a companion for students and general readers of Wordsworth's greatest poem.