Fyfield Books – serie

This generous, varied selection of poems by one of France's best-loved and most reviled poets is presented with facing originals, detailed notes, and a lively introduction to the author's life and work. Steven Monte presents more than eighty poems in translation and in the original French, taken from the earliest poetic publications of the 1820's, through collections published during exile, to works published in the years following Hugo's death in 1883. The introduction provides helpful background information about Hugo's life and work, the selection, and what is involved in translating a poet whose effortless rhymes are central to the poetry's power. Detailed notes at the back of the volume offer information about the poems and their publishing and historical contexts. This is an ideal introduction to a poet whose work, for all its renown, remains for Anglophone readers undiscovered.

For critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the great creative figures of the day, a painter and a poet of major stature. Yeats and the young Pound regarded him as an exemplary figure of solitary dedication to art and beauty. He called the sonnet 'a moment's monument', and his best short lyrics are instants of oppressed emotion cut free of time. In this, as in the suggestiveness of his imagery, he anticipates the French Symbolists. He can also be regarded as the founder of modern verse translation, not only for the freshness of his versions but also for his choice of poets---Villon, Cavalcanti and the young Dante. In this selection, Clive Wilmer has made a personal choice, emphasizing the 'pure poetry' of the lyrics at the expense of the more conventionally Victorian monologues and narratives. He has also included a generous selection from the translations, and provided a biographical and critical introduction.

Although the Brontës have long fascinated readers of fiction and biography, their poetry was all too little known until this pioneering selection by Stevie Davies, the novelist and critic. Charlotte (1816-1855) is certainly a competent poet, and Anne (1820-1849) developed a distinctive voice, while Emily (1818-1848) is one of the great women poets in English. Read together with their novels, the poems movingly elucidate the ideas around which the narratives revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions of the sisters' personalities: Emily's rebelliousness, for example, is counterbalanced here by great tenderness. This selection of over seventy poems gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling within each author's work, and of the way in which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each other.

Rimbaud called Charles Baudelaire 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu'. The history of modern poetry begins with him. This is a comprehensive translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannon-ball'. Here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.

These early poems, made readily accessible to a general readership for the first time, offer a unique opportunity to examine the apprenticeship of a great writer from the outset of his career. These poems reveal how the traumas of early life forged his vision and produced the insights that would make Wordsworth one of the most gifted celebrants of the human spirit. In effect, they chronicle the evolution of British Romanticism out of the aesthetic morass of the late eighteenth century.

This book is a collection of selected poems of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who is revealed as subtle and graceful poet and a translator whose vigorous and faithful versions of the Aeneid continue to enrich the literary tradition.

First published in 2003. Sir Thomas Wyatt stands at a crossroads in English poetry. He inherits the best of a medieval lyric tradition and, at the same time, points forward to the achievement of the Elizabethans. For the reader of today he is a modern poet before his time. This is a collection of his sonnets, epigrams, songs and pslams.

This book is Thomas Lovell Beddoes's defining text, a pastiche Renaissance tragedy replete with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting, the extravagant expression of the poet's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality. It is a classic of the literature of death.

This book presents a selection of the full range of Arthur Hugh Clough's poetry, which explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political, and literary landscape. It also includes a detailed introduction and annotations by Shirley Chew.Asked what problems most perplexed 'young men at present' Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) replied 'a growing sense of discrepancy'. His wry and wise poetry explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political and literary landscape. He has a sharp eye for absurdity. Clough was a writer of wide interests and liberal sympathies, vividly idiomatic and sensuous, delighting in the detail and variety of everyday life. His technical dexterity is a delight: the poems encompass satire and lyric, dialogue, plot and contemporary reference. His narrative poem he Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich and the epistolary Amours de Voyage have the momentum and social precision of novels, capturing a precise image of the Victorian world of the 1840s. This volume includes a generous selection of the full range of Clough's poetry, with a detailed introduction and annotations by Shirley Chew.

At the beginning of his career Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) wrote vigorous poetry, and plays which in their form and vehement characterisation resemble the later work of Samuel Beckett. This volume includes major works: One-Way Song , and Enemy of the Stars in its two very different versions, as well as other writings that can now be seen as central to the formation of Lewis's work. The plays and poems crackle with ferocious energy, concentrated and brilliant, as Lewis creates a literary equivalent to the visual revolutions of Cubism and Vorticism. He explores how an artist should think and write in an oppressive world, the relationship between imagination and action. This edition, with Alan Munton's annotations, is a definitive text based on Lewis's own final corrections. An introduction by C.H. Sisson places these radical works in the context of Lewis's other writings.

This book presents an ideal introduction to the full range of the works of Charlotte Smith, whose Romantic sensibility is an expression of a specifically female experience, from her influential sonnets and poems for children to extracts from her French Revolution poem.

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats, Pound and Eliot acknowledged their debt to him and were influenced by his sense of the city as the essential landscape of modernity. As a poet and critic, in his own right, though, Symons has come into his own in recent years. This selection is taken from the full range of Symons' poetry and prose, revealing an experimental writer exploring art, literature and music. Roger Holdsworth's introduction sets Symons in his context as both an 1890s Decadent and a precursor of Modernism.

First published in 2003. Sir Thomas Wyatt stands at a crossroads in English poetry. He inherits the best of a medieval lyric tradition and, at the same time, points forward to the achievement of the Elizabethans. For the reader of today he is a modern poet before his time. This is a collection of his sonnets, epigrams, songs and pslams.

First published in 2002. This is a collection of poems, songs and couplets by Christina Rossetti, including Maude: A Story For Girls, Christina's Maude is undoubtedly a self-portrait, and a highly critical one-but critical with standards of scrupulosity. The place of Christina's birth was 38 Charlotte Street, Portand Place, London; the date, 1830.