"Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside" occupies a distinctive and somewhat notorious place within George Meredith's already unique body of work. Modern Love is now best known for the emotionally intense sonnet cycle which Meredith's own cont...

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the ora...

"The King James Bible" stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English", sharing the honour only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significa...

Gustave Flaubert, one of the key figures in literary modernism, is famous for his determined pursuit of stylistic perfection. This notably involved the attempt to eliminate from his prose all sorts of assonances, consonances, and repetitions, in larg...

Who is the mysterious narrator of "Blindly"? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathe...

Winner of the 2006 Nordic Council's Literature Prize, Swedish writer Goran Sonnevi is undoubtedly one of the most important poets working today. In "Mozart's Third Brain", his thirteenth book of verse, he attempts "a commentary on everything" – polit...

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her ve...

In his "ABC of Reading", Ezra Pound begins his short list of nineteenth-century French poets to be studied with Theophile Gautier. Widely esteemed by figures as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Henr...

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot's on English-language verse. T...

"Five Spice Street" is a novel about a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Som...