A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Irish modernism, offering readers an accessible overview of key writers and artists.

W. B. Yeats is a writer who requires, and at the same time tests the limits of, contextual study. More than perhaps any other Irish writer, he produced his own context as much as it produced him. His cultural and political activities, combined with his prolific literary output, made an impact that can only be understood by close attention to his words in relation to the times in which he lived. W. B. Yeats in Context maps Yeats' world in concise, lively essays by distinguished critics and historians. The places, people, themes and intellectual frameworks most important to his development receive close attention, as do his artistic influences, and the production and reception of his work. As a gateway into the study of Yeats, this volume offers much new information for both students, scholars and anyone interested in the life and times of this enigmatic and influential poet.

This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.