San Antonio College Library

This biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, the author reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through...

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) was a poet of extraordinary talent who was long enveloped in obscurity, only beginning to be appreciated when she died. Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to her enigmatic reputation. Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker's life out of the shadows in this first full biography. She depicts Niedecker's watery world...

Pensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett. Volume 2. "In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced...

Overview: Ted Hughes described letter-writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world." These nearly 300 letters-selected from several thousand-show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud Englishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. There are letters dealing with Hughes's work on classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to the late, revelatory...

"Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era--Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others--Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking...

Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters, and dozens of interviews, Mariani has given us a balanced, passionate, and readable life, capturing not only the man but also his age, the Age of Lowell.

"William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience--social, political,...

Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for...

John and George Keats--man of genius and man of power--embodied sibling forms of Romanticism. George's emigration to the U.S. frontier created an abysm of loneliness and alienation in John that would inspire his most plangent and sublime poetry. Gigante's account places John's life in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers.

"Women's Poetry and Popular Culture brings a fresh approach to the field by showing that poems by women do not always subvert the mainstream, the media, and the marketplace. Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary...