Daniel Swift – författare

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de WaalIn 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade.At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.

One night in June 1943 James Swift, along with the Lancaster bomber he piloted, vanished. In Bomber County, his grandson Daniel seeks to discover what happened. At the same time he tries to understand the men who took part in these dangerous raids, as well as their devastating impact on the civilians below. In examining the life of one pilot, Daniel Swift also investigates why it is we have tried to forget what was then a new, shocking form of warfare, and why literature and poetry exploring these terrible losses have not found the recognition they deserve.

Shakespeare's Common Prayers revolves around Shakespeare's great overlooked source: the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, whose appearance established Protestantism as the compulsory belief of the day. Written in a simple vernacular and incorporating familiar Catholic rituals, the book laid out the proper performance of church rites and services. And yet it was also highly disputed and constantly in flux; as Daniel Swift shows, the prayer book's history is one of passionately contested revision and of manic sensitivity to a verb or a turn of phrase. In the book's ambiguities and fierce contestations, Swift argues, William Shakespeare found the ready elements of drama: dispute over words and their practical consequences, hope for sanctification tempered by fear of simple meaninglessness, and the demand for improvised performance as a compensation for the failure of language to do what it appears to promise.Swift offers a study of Shakespeare at work: of his imagination at play upon a set of literary materials from which he both borrowed and learned, of his manipulation of the explosive chemistry of word and action that comprised early modern liturgy. Swift argues that the Book of Common Prayer mediates between the secular and the devotional, producing a tension that helps make Shakespeare's plays so powerful and exceptional. Tracing the prayer book's lines and motions through As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, and particularly Macbeth, Swift redirects scholarly attention to the religious heart of Shakespeare's work and time.

“One of the most exciting and original books about Shakespeare that I’ve read in years.”—James ShapiroThe remarkable untold story of Shakespeare’s first theatre – the playhouse before the GlobeIn 1576, in a muddy field in Shoreditch, James Burbage erected London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouse. A place of high culture and quick profit, run by cunning dreamers, the Theatre for the first time offered London’s players the chance to control what they staged. At a time when playgoing was held to be close to a sin, this entertainment factory was a flashpoint for controversy – but would also become Shakespeare’s first theatre, where he learned to ply his trade before his company moved to the Globe.  Through the life of this little-known playhouse, Daniel Swift tells the story of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan stage began to flourish. Introducing us to the businessmen who dreamed up the Theatre, the carpenters who built it, the preachers who hated it, and the actors who performed upon its small stage, The Dream Factory recreates the world that produced Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and the audiences who first saw them.

John Berryman's Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital, he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation.This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.