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This book considers William Wordsworth's use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion's two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem's philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth's other major works, including The Prelude.Yen explores Wordsworth's iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth's prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth's writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth's poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of apparently ‘collateral'images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.

The book studies the impact of Stevensian and Valeryan poetics, and symbolist poetics more broadly, on a range of Anglo-American poets in untypical fashion. Pairing poets who are not usually studied in their relation to one another reveals mutuality and dissimilitude. Chapter I looks at Stevens and Valery from the vantage point of the senses as opposed to the more usual lens of their similar cerebral or philosophical temperaments. Although critics have largely and justifiably seen Stevens and Eliot in oppositional terms (Stevens proclaims them dead opposites), Lisa Goldfarb asks what happens when we look at them from the vantage point of their mutual interest in creating a musical poetics. Auden is principally known for his distaste for the symbolists and their magical poetics, yet he reserves special praise for Valery and considers him as his poetic mentor; Chapter III studies their poetics side-by-side. With Stevens and Audens mutual appreciation of Valery as a starting point, Chapter IV turns to a closer comparative study of Auden and Stevens, two poets who have traditionally been seen as operating in distinct poetic spheres. While Elizabeth Bishop famously eludes categorization in terms of poetic school or affiliation, a fifth chapter addresses her poetic music in relation to French symbolist poetics, one of the many poetic schools she admired. A sixth and final chapter examines Stevens musical legacy, in large part derived from the symbolists, and addresses the work of a range of modern and contemporary poets, with a final section devoted to the work of contemporary poet, Susan Howe.

Die germanistische Forschung fasste den Symbolismus bislang eher als ein transitorisches Phänomen, beschränkte ihn auf die Jahrhundertwende und betrachtete ihn aus einer engen nationalliterarischen Perspektive. Die vorliegende komparatistische Studie rekonstruiert nun erstmals systematisch die Rezeption der französischsprachigen Symbolisten in der deutschen Lyrik von 1890 bis 1923 und verdeutlicht ihre zentrale Rolle in der Modernisierung der deutschen Dichtersprache. Die Monographie gliedert sich in drei Teile. Der erste Teil ist dem französischen Symbolismus gewidmet. Die zweite Sektion dokumentiert den übersetzerischen Transfer. Der dritte Teil konzentriert sich auf die produktionsästhetische Aneignung und Modifikation der symbolistischen Poetik. Aufgrund ihrer Materialfülle, ihrer Auswertung neuer Quellen und ihrer Einbeziehung zahlreicher in Vergessenheit geratener Dichter stellt diese Monographie ein unverzichtbares Nachschlagewerk zur Geschichte der Symbolismus-Bewegung und der deutsch-französischen Literaturbeziehungen dar.

In the symbolic language of ballads, a lady's costly dress tells of the beauty of the body beneath it or of the wearer's happiness; a lost hawk or hound foreshadows the hunter's fate long before the plot reaches a turning point. In her original and far-reaching study of such familiar narrative elements, Edith Randam Rogers adds much to our understanding of poetic expression in the ballad tradition.In focusing on individual motifs as they appear in different ballads, different languages, and different periods, Rogers proves the existence of a reliable lingua franca of symbolism in European balladry. Lines or even whole stanzas that have defied interpretation often come to life when the reader is aware of the meaning of a particular motif in such an international vocabulary of images. Thus this book makes available important new critical tools sure to have significant results for ballad scholarship.

An homage to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, this collection of essays sheds new light on canonical authors such as Ibsen, Beckett, and Strindberg. Using style and structure as the connective thread, Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing.

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart's membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many other poets have belonged to, or been influenced by not only the Freemasons, but the Rosicrucians, Gormogons and Hell-Fire Clubs. First published in 1986, this study concentrates on five major examples: Smart, Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a number of other poets. Marie Roberts questions why so many poets have been powerfully attracted to the secret societies, and considers the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for conveying secret emblems and ritual. She shows how some poets believed that poetry would prove a hidden symbolic language in which to reveal great truths.The beliefs of these poets are as diverse as their practice, and this book sheds fascinating light on several major writers.

What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom of an impossibility of representation and of an irreparable loss at the heart of language.

This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

This edition of Laforgue's Dernier Vers stems from the editors'critical interest in the poems themselves and from their feeling that Laforgue has not been well represented by anthologies and selections, which have usually placed a wrong emphasis on his earlier, more blatantly decadent work. The twelve poems making up the Derniers Vers, written in 1886, the year before Laforgue's death, were previously thought to be a disconnected series. The editors show that they are, rather, a carefully planned and developed sequence, representing the successful resolution of artistic problems which had occupied the poet during the previous five or six years. To Laforgue, poetry as art, not communication, and throughout his life he had tried to discover a way of writing a poem the impact and character of which would be analogous to painting and music. This edition, prepared for English-speaking readers, will be particularly interest because of the important influence of the poems on Exra Pound, who called Laforgue'the most sophisticated of all French poets,'and on T.S. Eliot, who acknowledged that the poetry he wrote in 1908 and 1909'was directly drawn from a study of Laforgue,''if not quite the greatest French poet after Baudelaire... certainly the most important technical innovator.'The editors have drawn on previously unused manuscripts and papers for their informative and illuminating notes. They have also provided an Introduction which places Laforgue in historical and artistic perspective, and sheds interesting light on those aspects of his personal life which are reflected in his writing.

Distinguishing figural or typological allegory—a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament—from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature—works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan—he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.

In a controversial examination of the conceptual bases of Blake's myth, Leopold Damrosch argues that his poems contain fundamental contradictions, but that this fact docs not imply philosophical or artistic failure.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.