Written over the last thirty years, this collection of Professor Peter Verdonk's most important work on the stylistics of poetry clearly shows that the stylistics of poetic discourse is a diverse and valuable interdiscipline. Discussing the poetry of Auden, Heaney and Larkin amongst many others, Verdonk covers everything from intrinsic textual meaning and external context in its widest sense to the reader's cognitive and emotive response to poems. The book will appeal to all students on stylistics and literary linguistics courses, especially those focussing on poetry and poetic language.

Stylistics is a branch of Applied Linguistics and deals with the various levels of language – graphological/phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic/discourse. In this book, each level is lucidly explained with relevant theoretical concepts, and they are practically applied to two poems as model-exercises. With the evidences explicitly available and insinuations implicitly conveyed in the text, each poem is insightfully examined through a linguistics lens to explore the stylistic nuances embedded in it. It can be exciting and interesting to anyone interested in the English language and poetic style in addition to students of literature.

This book theoretically defines and linguistically analyses the popular notion that poetry is ‘difficult’ - hard to read, hard to understand, hard to engage with. It is the first work to offer a stylistic and cognitive model that sheds new light on the mechanisms of difficulty, as well as on its range of potential effects. Its eight chapters are organised into two thematic parts. The first traces the history of difficulty, surveys its main scholarly traditions, addresses related themes – from elitism to obscurity, from abstraction to intentionality – and introduces a wide array of analytical tools from literary theory and cognitive psychology. These tools are then consistently applied in the second part, which includes several extended analyses of poems by canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, alongside those of postmodernist innovators such as Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, among others. This innovative work will provide fresh insights and approaches for scholars of stylistics, literary studies, cognitive poetics and psychology.

A career-long overview of the work of Verdonk, covering the development of the stylistics of poetry.

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose examines how readers interact with literary works, how they understand and are moved by them. Mick Short considers how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carying out stylistic analysis of poetry, drama and prose fiction in turn. He analyses a wide range of extracts from English literature, adopting an accessible approach to the analysis of literary texts which can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages.

This book takes a particular perspective on the nature of poetry and follows this through to proposals for teaching. It focuses attention on how the use of language in short poems can set up conditions for individual interpretation and the representation of reality in ways other than those which are established by normal social convention. This view of poetry, it is argued, leads to a recognition of its essential role in education, and provides a set of principles for an approach to teaching it which integrates the study of language and literature.

Part of a new collection of literary voices from Gibbs Smith, written by, and for, extraordinary women—to encourage, challenge, and inspire. One of American’s most distinctive poets, Emily Dickinson scorned the conventions of her day in her approach to writing, religion, and society. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection from her vast archive of poetry to inspire the writers, creatives, and leaders of today. Continue your journey in the Women’s Voices series with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft.