The works of these two writers are especially appropriate for linguistic and epistemological study because we find in them an unusually large amount of theorizing about the function of poetry and language-implicit in their poetry and explicit in Arnold's formal criticism and in Hopkins' letters and journals. It is a striking fact that their theorizing is itself as internally divided as the obvious polarities within each man's career. The general thesis of this book is that the racking conflicts and painful doubts of Arnold and Hopkins about the role of poetry in the modern world-and in their own lives-were brought about in large part by the philosophical dilemma we have been discussing and, further, that their careers illuminate the problem with enormous and sometimes horrifying clarity.

The shattering final instalment of Philip Reeve's Predator Cities quartet flings you back into his blasted world of predator cities, ruinous wars and terrifying Stalkers. Abandoned by Hester, Tom and Wren stumble across the wreckage of a vast traction city: London. As the Green Storm take arms and the truce with the Traction Cities splinters, the world is on a collision course - beginning and ending in London's ruined shell. As everything Tom and Hester know and love hurtles towards apocalypse, who will be left to tell the tale? Winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize 2007, this epic finale is fast-moving, thrilling, heartbreaking - and as exciting as hell!

A Darkling Plain fills a scholarly void by asking how people maintain or reclaim their humanity during war.

The 1930s marked a turning point for the world. Scientific and technological revolutions, economic and social upheavals, and the outbreak of war changed the course of history. The 1930s also marked a turning point for Robinson Jeffers, both in his career as a poet and in his private life. The letters collected in this second volume of annotated correspondence document Jeffers' rising fame as a poet, his controversial response to the turmoil of his time, his struggles as a writer, the growth and maturation of his twin sons, and the network of friends and acquaintances that surrounded him. The letters also provide an intimate portrait of Jeffers' relationship to his wife Una—including a full account of the 1938 crisis at Mabel Dodge Luhan's home in Taos, New Mexico that nearly destroyed their marriage.

Originally published in 1947 and presenting the famed poet-novelist against the background of contemporary thought and society, Harvey Curtis Webster shows that Hardy's later works give consistent evidence of hope; that pervasive pessimism was by no means the keynote of Hardy's thought. On a Darkling Plain traces the evolution of Hardy's thought, from faith, through disillusionment, to a cautious belief in the ultimate progress of man.

Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908–1984), along with his contemporaries Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakoski, provide an important bridge between the vanguard modernist American poets and the later works of poets such as Robert Creeley. In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collectionOf Being Numerousreceived the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.

Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific, religious, and philosophical thought. Interwoven and resonating in sensuous song is their own thought. The best of the poetry fits the word and thought to the troubling developments of the time and rises to a prophecy to predict the problems of our time.

In 1651 the young King Charles II fights to regain his crown, and leads an army to Worcester, where he suffers a disastrous defeat. In his flight to safety, he is sheltered by a young pregnant widow, whose late husband was the rumored bastard of his grandmother. He vows to protect her and her unborn child when he regains the throne.Upon his Restoration he seeks out his savior, only to find she is dead, leaving behind a daughter named Lisette. Charles takes her as his ward and brings her to Court. Nine-year old Lisette Gordon is uprooted from a God-fearing home to be raised in the bawdy-house known as Whitehall Palace, where she becomes the mistress to both the King and his bastard son Jamie. After rebelling against the amoral ways of the Court, Charles sends her back to her home near Dover, where she finds true love in Angus Gordon. The lovers must struggle to maintain their love through many tribulations, including the continuing obsession of Jamie with Lisette and her addiction to laudanum.

With authority and sensitivity Plotkin traces the close relationship between Hopkins's poetry and the theories of language suggested in his Journals and expounded by Victorian philologists such as Max Müller and George Marsh. Plotkin seeks to determine what changed Hopkins's perception of language between the writing of such early poems as "The Habit of Perfection" and "Nondum" (1866) and his creation of The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875-76). Did the language of the ode, and of Hopkins's mature poetry generally, arise as spontaneously as it appears to have done, or does it have a traceable genesis in the ways in which language as a whole was conceived and studied in mid-century England? In answer, Plotkin fixes the development of Hopkins's singular poetic language in the philological context of his time. If one is to understand Hopkins's writings and poetic language in the context in which they developed rather than in the terms of a present-day theory of history or textuality, then that movement in all of its complexity must be considered. Hopkins "translates" into the language of poetry patterns and categories common to Victorian language study.