Once the dominant literary form, poetry was gradually eclipsed by the realist novel; indeed, by 1940 W. H. Auden was able to note, "Poetry makes nothing happen." In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Franco Felluga explores the cultural background of poetry's marginalization by examining nineteenth-century reactions to Romantic poetry and ideology. Focusing on the work of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as periodical reviews, student manuals, and contemporary medical journals, the book details the period's two contending (and equally outrageous) claims regarding poetry. Scott's poetry, on the one hand, was continually represented as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Byron's, by contrast, was represented either as a cancer in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms. The book concludes with a coda on Alfred Lord Tennyson, which illustrates how the Victorian reception of Scott and Byron affected the most popular poetic genius of midcentury. Ultimately, The Perversity of Poetry uncovers how the shift to a rhetoric of health allowed critics to oppose what they perceived as a potent and potentially dangerous influence on the age, the very thing that would over the course of the century be marginalized into such obscurity: poetry, thanks to its perverse insistence on making something happen.

With a broad geographic and linguistic sweep covering more than one hundred years of poetry, this book investigates the relationships between and among technology, aesthetics, and politics in Ibero-American experimental poetry. Eduardo Ledesma analyzes visual, concrete, kinetic, and digital poetry that questions what the "literary" means, what constitutes poetry, and how, if at all, visual and verbal arts should be differentiated. Radical Poetry examines how poets use the latest technologies (cinematography, radio, television, and software) to create poetry that self-consciously interrogates its own form, through close alliances with conceptual and abstract art, performance, photography, film, and new media. To do so, Ledesma draws on pertinent theories of metaphor, affect, time, space, iconicity, and cybernetics. Ledesma shows how José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Joan Salvat-Papasseit (Catalonia), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Fernando Millán (Spain), Décio Pignatari (Brazil), Ana María Uribe (Argentina), and others turn words, machines, and, more recently, the digital into flesh, making word-objects "come alive" by assembling text to act and seem human, whether on the page, on walls, or on screens.

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.

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.

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation argues that the dialectic and dynamic relationship between the periodical review and poetry creates a culture of evaluation which shapes Victorian poetic form. The mediation of poetry by the periodical review orients poets towards public readership and reception, heightening their self-consciousness about their audience and generating a poetics of publicness. Using methodologies associated with historical poetics and new formalism, the book examines the dialogues between poets and periodical reviews from the 1830s to the 1860s. It juxtaposes male and female poets and canonical and uncanonical texts. Challenging the critical binaries of fame and celebrity, the culture of evaluation posits a new way of reading Victorian poetry. It illuminates poets' engagement with the immediacy and inevitability of writing for the present and for the contemporary media through which poetry was read and disseminated. New patterns of reception were created by mass print culture and both poets and reviewers were preoccupied with reaching the newly constituted mass audience. The changes to the material forms of poetry (e.g. through the periodical or gift-book) and the subjection to the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplace encouraged bold experiment with verse. The book identifies three poetic strategies for articulating the preoccupation with a mass audience and the demands of mass media: voice, style and address. Chapters on voice, style, and address explore the development of poetic form in dialogue with periodical reviews.