Stanza the dog and his two rotten brothers terrorize the streets by day, but at night Stanza secretly writes poetry.

First published in 1978, this work bridges the gap between the study of poetic form, which tends to isolate form from meaning and structural poetics, which tends to focus on meaning without considering the stanza’s impact. Beginning with an examination of the various definitions of the stanza, the book goes on to describe the many forms of the stanza and the different strategies by which poets achieve stanzaic units of meaning. It then evaluates the logical relationships between stanzas, and, finally, assesses their place and function as parts within the poetic whole. This work will be of interest to those studying poetry and literature.

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable "Stanzas in Meditation." Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas's work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.This edition of "Stanzas in Meditation" is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors' preface and poet Joan Retallack's introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein's oeuvre.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The general focus in Lakota oral literary research has been on content rather than process within oral traditions. In this groundbreaking study of the characteristics of Lakota oral style, Delphine Red Shirt shows how its composition and structure are reflected in the work of George Sword, who composed 245 pages of text in the Lakota language using the English alphabet. What emerges in Sword’s Lakota narratives are the formulaic patterns inherent in the Lakota language that are used to tell the narratives, as well as recurring themes and story patterns. Red Shirt’s primary conclusion is that this cadence originates from a distinctly Lakota oral tradition. Red Shirt analyzes historical documents and original texts in Lakota to answer the question: How is Lakota literature defined? Her pioneering work uncovers the epistemological basis of this literature, which can provide material for literary studies, anthropological and traditional linguistics, and translation studies. Her analysis of Sword’s texts discloses tools that can be used to determine whether the origin of any given narrative in Lakota tradition is oral, thereby opening avenues for further research.

The second of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the second volume of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume follows Auden as a mature artist, containing all the poems that he published or submitted for publication from 1940 until his death in 1973, at age sixty-six. This includes all his poetry collections from this period, from The Double Man (1941) through Epistle to a Godson (1972). The volume also features an edited version of his incomplete, posthumous book Thank You, Fog, as well as his self-designated “posthumous” poems. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The first volume of this edition, Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, is also available.

Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.