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Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
by Lana Del ReyThe New York Times bestselling debut book of poetry from Lana Del Rey, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass.&“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I&’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.&” —Lana Del ReyLana&’s breathtaking first book solidifies her further as &“the essential writer of her times&” (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum, and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana&’s typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is also brought to life in an unprecedented spoken word audiobook which features Lana Del Rey reading fourteen select poems from the book accompanied by music from Grammy Award–winning musician Jack Antonoff.
Violets: A Collection Of Inspirational Poems By The Women Of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated
by Shahari MooreViolets is a collection of poems by the women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated, the largest African American Sorority in the world. The 22 contributing poets bring range, color, complexity and inspiration to the page.
Virgil in the Renaissance
by David Scott Wilson-OkamuraThe disciplines of classical scholarship were established in their modern form between 1300 and 1600, and Virgil was a test case for many of them. What became of Virgil in this period - how he was understood and how his poems were recycled - is an example of something that occurs to every classic when it outlives it original context: the words remain but their meaning becomes unsponsored. What did readers assume about Virgil in the long decades between Dante and Sidney, Petrarch and Spenser, Boccaccio and Ariosto? Which commentators had the most influence? What story, if any, was Virgil's Eclogues supposed to tell? What was the status of his Georgics? Which parts of his epic attracted the most imitators? Building on specialized scholarship of the last hundred years, this book provides a panoramic synthesis of what scholars and poets from across Europe believed they could know about Virgil's life and poetry.
Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid
by David QuintThe message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar. Things changed when late twentieth-century readers saw the ancient poem expressing their own misgivings about empire and one-man rule. In this timely book, David Quint depicts a Virgil who consciously builds contradiction into the Aeneid. The literary trope of chiasmus, reversing and collapsing distinctions, returns as an organizing signature in Virgil's writing: a double cross for the reader inside the Aeneid's story of nation, empire, and Caesarism. Uncovering verbal designs and allusions, layers of artfulness and connections to Roman history, Quint's accessible readings of the poem's famous episodes--the fall of Troy, the story of Dido, the trip to the Underworld, and the troubling killing of Turnus—disclose unsustainable distinctions between foreign war/civil war, Greek/Roman, enemy/lover, nature/culture, and victor/victim. The poem's form, Quint shows, imparts meanings it will not say directly. The Aeneid's life-and-death issues—about how power represents itself in grand narratives, about the experience of the defeated and displaced, and about the ironies and revenges of history—resonate deeply in the twenty-first century.This new account of Virgil's masterpiece reveals how the Aeneid conveys an ambivalence and complexity that speak to past and present.
Virgil’s Eclogues and the Art of Fiction
by Raymond KaniaMany scholars have seen ancient bucolic poetry as a venue for thinking about texts and textuality. This book reassesses Virgil's Eclogues and their genre, arguing that they are better read as fiction - that is, as a work that refers not merely to itself or to other texts but to a world of its own making. This makes for a rich work of art and an object of legitimate aesthetic and imaginative engagement. Increased attention to the fictionality of Virgilian poetry also complicates and enriches the Eclogues' social and political dimensions. The book offers new interpretations of poems like Eclogues 5 and 9, which, according to traditional allegorical readings, concern Julius Caesar and the confiscation of lands under Octavian, respectively. It shows how the Eclogue world stands in a less stable relation to reality; these poems challenge readers at every turn to reimagine the relationship between fiction and the real.
Virgil's Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid
by J. D. ReedVirgil's Aeneid invites its reader to identify with the Roman nation whose origins and destiny it celebrates. But, as J. D. Reed argues in Virgil's Gaze, the great Roman epic satisfies this identification only indirectly--if at all. In retelling the story of Aeneas' foundational journey from Troy to Italy, Virgil defines Roman national identity only provisionally, through oppositions to other ethnic identities--especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek--oppositions that shift with the shifting perspective of the narrative. Roman identity emerges as multivalent and constantly changing rather than unitary and stable. The Roman self that the poem gives us is capacious--adaptable to a universal nationality, potentially an imperial force--but empty at its heart. However, the incongruities that produce this emptiness are also what make the Aeneid endlessly readable, since they forestall a single perspective and a single notion of the Roman. Focusing on questions of narratology, intertextuality, and ideology, Virgil's Gaze offers new readings of such major episodes as the fall of Troy, the pageant of heroes in the underworld, the death of Turnus, and the disconcertingly sensual descriptions of the slain Euryalus, Pallas, and Camilla. While advancing a highly original argument, Reed's wide-ranging study also serves as an ideal introduction to the poetics and principal themes of the Aeneid.
Virgil's Homeric Lens (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies)
by Edan DekelVirgil’s Homeric Lens reevaluates the traditional view of the Aeneid’s relationship to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Almost since the death of Virgil, there has been an assumption that the Aeneid breaks into two discrete halves: Virgil’s Odyssey, and Virgil’s Iliad. Although modified in various ways over the centuries, this neat dichotomy has generally diminished the complexity and resonance of the connection between the two canonical epic poets. This work offers an alternate approach in which Virgil uses the transformative power of the Odyssey as a precise filter through which to read the Iliadic experience. By examining the ways in which Virgil bases his own epic project on the dynamic interaction between the two Homeric poems themselves, Edan Dekel proposes a system in which the Aeneid uses the Odyssey both as a conceptual model for writing an intertextual epic and as a powerful refracting lens for the specific interpretation of the Iliad and its consequences. The traditional view of the Homeric poems as static sources for the construction of distinct "Odyssean" and "Iliadic" halves of the Aeneid is supplanted by an analysis which emphasizes the active and persistent influence of the Odyssey as a guide to processing the major thematic concerns of the Iliad and exploring the multiple aftermaths of the Trojan war.
Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal
by David Dowker Christine StewartVirtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees. Lush and extravagant, this is writing tuned in to the terrestrial spectacle.
The Virtues of Poetry
by James LongenbachAn illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe)"This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's prefaceThe Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.
Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture
by Peter BalakianPeter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond. " And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something--a person, an event, an object, a form in nature. " Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.
Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture
by Peter BalakianPeter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something—a person, an event, an object, a form in nature."Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.
The Visible: Poems
by Bruce BondIn The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page-the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see.Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand."
Visible Signs
by Lawrence RaabA poem by Lawrence Raab is a carefully chosen and precisely rendered moment—a poised and elegant meditation on the nature of memory. This new collection includes a selection from each of Raab's five previous books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems. Readers will delight in their wide-ranging subjects, from "Miles Davis on Art" to "Saint Augustine's Dog," from the inventions of Rube Goldberg to the recklessness of dreams. .
Visible Signs
by Lawrence RaabA poem by Lawrence Raab is a carefully chosen and precisely rendered moment--a poised and elegant meditation on the nature of memory. This new collection includes a selection from each of Raab's five previous books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems. Readers will delight in their wide-ranging subjects, from "Miles Davis on Art" to "Saint Augustine's Dog," from the inventions of Rube Goldberg to the recklessness of dreams.
The Vision
by Kahlil Gibran Juan R. ColeThe Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul brings together Kahlil Gibran's Arabic writings concerned with the spiritual life. In twenty-four meditations, essays, and prose poems, Gibran expounds his unique philosophy of life while discussing such perennial themes as Beauty, Nature, Hidden Realities, Human Unity, Tragedy, Pride, Death, and the Immortality of the Soul.Gibran's religious vision is world-embracing and ecumenical. He read widely and was inspired by Buddhism, Vedanta, American Transcendentalists, and Nietzsche, along with his primary influences of Eastern Christianity, Islam, and the folk traditions of his native Near Eastern culture. His fervent belief in humanity's common heritage and shared destiny has made his writings popular the world over and classics of modern religious literature.Juan Cole's stunning and lyric translation revives Gibran's passionate stories of spiritual transcendence through love and suffering.
The Vision
by Kahlil Gibran Juan R. ColeThe Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul brings together Kahlil Gibran's Arabic writings concerned with the spiritual life. In twenty-four meditations, essays, and prose poems, Gibran expounds his unique philosophy of life while discussing such perennial themes as Beauty, Nature, Hidden Realities, Human Unity, Tragedy, Pride, Death, and the Immortality of the Soul.Gibran's religious vision is world-embracing and ecumenical. He read widely and was inspired by Buddhism, Vedanta, American Transcendentalists, and Nietzsche, along with his primary influences of Eastern Christianity, Islam, and the folk traditions of his native Near Eastern culture. His fervent belief in humanity's common heritage and shared destiny has made his writings popular the world over and classics of modern religious literature.Juan Cole's stunning and lyric translation revives Gibran's passionate stories of spiritual transcendence through love and suffering.
The Vision
by Kahlil Gibran Juan R. ColeThe Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul brings together Kahlil Gibran's Arabic writings concerned with the spiritual life. In twenty-four meditations, essays, and prose poems, Gibran expounds his unique philosophy of life while discussing such perennial themes as Beauty, Nature, Hidden Realities, Human Unity, Tragedy, Pride, Death, and the Immortality of the Soul.Gibran's religious vision is world-embracing and ecumenical. He read widely and was inspired by Buddhism, Vedanta, American Transcendentalists, and Nietzsche, along with his primary influences of Eastern Christianity, Islam, and the folk traditions of his native Near Eastern culture. His fervent belief in humanity's common heritage and shared destiny has made his writings popular the world over and classics of modern religious literature.Juan Cole's stunning and lyric translation revives Gibran's passionate stories of spiritual transcendence through love and suffering.
A Vision: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIV
by William Butler Yeats Catherine E. Paul Margaret Mills HarperA new annotated edition of Yeats's indispensable, lifelong work of philosophy--a meditation on the connections between the imagination, history, and the metaphysical--this volume reveals the poet's greatest thoughts on the occult.First published in 1925, and then substantially revised by the author in 1937, A Vision is a unique work of literary modernism, and revelatory guide to Yeats's own poetry and thinking. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work, and entrancing on its own merit, the book presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife, George, received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the original book that he wrote in 1925, and the 1937 version is the definitive version of what Yeats wanted to say. Now, presented in a scholarly edition for the first time by Yeats scholars Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul, the 1937 version of A Vision is an important, essential literary resource and a must-have for all serious readers of Yeats.
Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters: Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts #15)
by David CecilAn eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic paintersIn Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
by Harold BloomThis is a revised and enlarged edition of the most extensive and detailed critical reading of English Romantic poetry ever attempted in a single volume. It is both a valuable introduction to the Romantics and an influential work of literary criticism. The perceptive interpretations of the major poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Beddoes, Clare, and Darley develop the themes of Romantic myth-making and the dialectical relationship between nature and imagination. For this new edition, Harold Bloom has added an introductory essay on the historical backgrounds of English Romantic poetry and an epilogue relating his book to literary trends.
Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism's Quotidian Sublime (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
by Markus PoetzschVisionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the focus from Burke’s and Kant’s prescriptions of natural vastness and grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous spaces, objects and experiences of everyday life. This shift is defined as a descent from mountaintops to an encounter, in William Blake’s terms, with 'a World in a Grain of Sand.' The purpose of this book is to sift the literature of the Romantic everyday, both prose and poetry, canonical and noncanonical, for such grains. In order to define the inherently amorphous and subsumptive sphere called 'everyday life,' the author draws upon two main theoretical threads: the first, based on the phenomenological poetics of Gaston Bachelard, serves to elucidate the depth and diversity of everyday household space; the second, comprising the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, defines the generative potential, what de Certeau glosses as the 'everyday creativity,' of some of the most basic human activities such as walking, reading and washing, to name but a few. The role of the everyday in Romantic literature has in recent years received greater scholarly attention, particularly from critics dissatisfied with the perpetuation of what Karina Williamson characterizes as a 'debased Romanticism which rules there is a category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the rest is ordinary and inadmissible.' The present study serves to map the intersections of these categories of experience and expression—the sublime and the quotidian—and thereby to challenge our assumptions about the aesthetic value of the everyday not only in the Romantic period but also in our own.
Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam WarPeace
by Lynda Van Devanter Joan A. FureyThe women who contributed to this anthology were nurses, military personnel, Red Cross workers, and Vietnamese civilians - all of whom had firsthand experience with the Vietnam War. Their poems reveal the human side of the conflict and give voice to the role of women during warfare. This sale of this book helped to fund the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, D. C.
Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North
by Ida PfeifferA besetting sin of the Icelanders is their drunkenness. Their poverty would probably not be so great if they were less devoted to brandy, and worked more industriously. <P> <P> It is dreadful to see what deep root this vice has taken. Not only on Sundays, but also on week-days, I met peasants who were so intoxicated that I was surprised how they could keep in their saddle. I am, however, happy to say that I never saw a woman in this degrading condition.
A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers
by Nancy WillardNancy Willard was inspired by William Blake's verbal and visual imagery as a child. She has now produced a book of poems that are not "in the style of" but more of an homage to Blake's poetry. The organizing principle is that Blake runs and inn and it is staffed and patronized by a variety of fanciful creatures and people. The rhyme schemes and words are mostly simple enough for children. The allusions and imagery extend the interest to older readers.<P><P> Newbery Medal Winner
A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers
by Nancy Willard Alice Provensen Martin ProvensenInspired by William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, this delightful collection of poetry for children brings to life Blake’s imaginary inn and its unusual guests.