A collection of interviews with 16 prominent Latino poets reveals how they found their niche in American literature and what political and social issues helped shape their personal and creative lives.

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of 'ecstasy') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience - including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge - in the life of their culture.

In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.

A comprehensive study of Shakespeare's forgotten masterpiece The Phoenix and Turtle . Bednarz confronts the question of why one of the greatest poems in the English language is customarily ignored or misconstrued by Shakespeare biographers, literary historians, and critics.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

Using the works of Dante as its critical focus, María Rosa Menocal's original and imaginative study examines questions of truth, ideology, and reality in poetry as they occur in a series of texts and in the relationship between those texts across time. In each case, Menocal raises theoretical issues of critical importance to contemporary debates regarding the structure of literary relations. Beginning with a reading of La vita nuova and the Commedia, this literary history of poetic literary histories explores the Dantean poetic experience as it has been limited and rewritten by later poets, particularly Petrarch, Boccaccio, Borges, Pound, Eliot, and the all but forgotten Silvio Pellico, author of Le mie prigioni. By blending discussions of Dante's own marriage of literature and literary history with those investigations into the imitative qualities of later works, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth presents an intertextual literary history, one which seeks to maintain the uncanniness of literature, while imagining history to be neither linear nor clearly distinguishable from literature itself.