First published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This study presents insights into poetry as discourse ooking at language, conventual literary theory, and then a detailed look at the iambic pentameter, ballads in English Poetry, looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Also included is commentary on transparency looking at Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and Romanticism in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Wordworth's Tintern Abbey. Before ending on the future of poetry there is also a section on the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poetry of Homer. By situating formulas and other features of oral style within the wider contexts of spoken language and communication, he moves the study of oral poetry beyond the landmark work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. One of the book's central features, related to the research of the linguist Wallace Chafe, is Bakker's conception of spoken discourse as a sequence of short speech units reflecting the flow of speech through the consciousness of the speaker. Bakker shows that such short speech units are present in Homeric poetry, with significant consequences for Homeric metrics and poetics. Considering Homeric discourse as a speech process rather than as the finished product associated with written discourse, Bakker's book offers a new perspective on Homer as well as on other archaic Greek texts. Here Homeric discourse appears as speech in its own right, and is freed, Bakker suggests, from the bias of modern writing style which too easily views Homeric discourse as archaic, implicitly taking the style of classical period texts as the norm. Bakker's perspective reaches beyond syntax and stylistics into the very heart of Homeric—and, ultimately, oral—poetics, altering the status of key features such as meter and formula, rethinking their relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry, and leading to surprising insights into the relation between "speech" and "text" in the encounter of the Homeric tradition with writing.

Political Poetry as Discourse examines the works of the political poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Ebenezer Elliott, drawing comparisons to contemporary hip hoppers who take their words from local newspapers and other discursive sources that they read, hear, and observe. Local presses and news vehicles stand as cultural material forms that supply poets with words, particularly words that congeal into patterns of language, allowing the creation of a poetic discourse. As readers of these poets apply techniques and theories of discourse analysis, they reveal how poets borrow, lift, hijack, or resituate words from one or more different genres to use as tools of political change. Leonard engages with the critical toolboxes of content analysis, semiosis, and deconstruction to demonstrate how to critically investigate and interrogate the images, sounds and words not just of politically engaged poets, but also of any disseminator of culture and news. Moving beyond theory into praxis, this book becomes a model of its own transgressive premise by thinking, analyzing, writing, and teaching against the grain. Its focus on language as unbounded discourse makes this book a relevant and insightful demonstration in democratic pedagogy and in teaching for transformation.

Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s Eschatological Poetry offers a compelling critique of John Donne’s religious and erotic poetry, focusing on the intersection of two seemingly antithetical discourses: the language of the scientific revolution and of Christian eschatology. Throughout its three chapters, which correspond to three scientific disciplines – cartography, physics and alchemy – the volume examines the ways in which the references to early modern and medieval science in Donne’s poetry contribute to conceptualizing the Christian mystery of death.

This study of four major poets - Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Holderlin - examines the self-reflexivity of modern poetry, exploring questions concerning what it means for a poem to be "about" its own process of saying. What does it mean to read and understand a text that is focused not on its content but on its saying? What kind of relation does a writer have to the language used in a text? How are we to think about the relation of content to the saying? In the chapter on Mallarme, the author uses several close readings to investigate the referentiality of literature in general and the concept of "undecidability" in Mallarme. For example, in "A la nue accablante tu" he shows the way undecidability operates in syntax, metaphorics, sounds, and plays on individual letters of the alphabet. The chapter on Rimbaud explores the significance of the poet's famous statement "JE est un autre" ("I is an other"), leading to a meditation on the question of the control of the author, the relationship between saying and that which is said, the way in which language overwhelms the speaker. In the Baudelaire chapter, the author analyzes the themes of memory and imagination in Baudelaire's writings on painting and Victor Hugo, showing how these themes reveal the writer's thoughts on artistic conception and execution. The author then reads Holderlin's hymn "Der Rhein" with the fifth of Rousseau's "Reveries du promeneur solitaire," showing how in Holderlin's poem and other texts the crucial issue is a paradoxical relationship between lack and fullness or perfection. The final Holderlin chapter presents a sustained critique of Heidegger's exegesis of Holderlin, opening new avenues in the discussions of both Holderlin and Heidegger.

“When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.” In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.