The British Poets

DIVRich selection of powerful, moving verse includes Brooke's "The Soldier," Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "In Flanders Fields," by Lieut. Col. McCrae, more by Hardy, Kipling, many others. /div

An anthology of works by British poets from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries such as William Blake, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and Dylan Thomas.

Devoted to close readings of poets and their contexts from various postmodern perspectives, this book offers a wide-ranging look at the work of feminists and "post feminist" poets, working class poets, and poets of diverse cultural backgrounds, as well as provocative re-readings of such well-established and influential figures as Donald Davie, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Craig Raine. Contributors include many respected theorists and critics, such as Antony Easthope, C.L. Innes, John Matthias, Edward Larrissy, Linda Anderson, Eric Homberger, Alastair Niven, R.K. Meiners, and Cairns Craig, in addition to new writers working from new theoretical perspectives. Their approaches range from cultural theory to poststructuralism; each essayist addresses a general audience while engaging in debates of interest to postgraduates and specialists in the fields of twentieth-century poetry and cultural studies. The book's strength lies in its diversity at every level.

This anthology gathers 368 poems by 80 British women poets of the long eighteenth century. Few of these poems have been reprinted since originally published, and all are crucial to understanding fully the literary history of women writers. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia demonstrate the enormous diversity of poetry produced during this time by organizing the poems in three broad and deliberately overlapping categories: by genre, establishing that women wrote in all of the forms that men did with equal mastery and creativity; by theme, offering a revisionary look at the range of topics these writers addressed, including war, ecology, friendship, religion, and the stages of life; and by the poems’ more specific focus on the women’s experiences as writers. Backscheider and Ingrassia have selected poems that represent the best work of skilled poets, creating a wonderful mix of canonical and little-known pieces. They include the complete texts of longer poems that are abridged or omitted in other collections. Their substantial part introductions, textual notes, bibliographical information, and biographical sketches situate the poets and their writings within the cultural and political milieu in which they appeared. To generate further scholarship on this subject, this essential anthology puts primary texts in front of students, scholars, and general readers. It fills the persistent need to document women’s poetic expression during the long eighteenth century and to rewrite the literary history of the period, a history from which women have largely been excluded.

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.

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.

Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; this Filigree anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalization of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of poets the Inscribe project has nurtured and continues to support.