Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poetry—much of it known to Russians by heart—is the cornerstone of the Russian literary tradition, yet until now there has been no detailed commentary of it in any language.
    Michael Wachtel’s book, designed for those who can read Russian comfortably but not natively, provides the historical, biographical, and cultural context needed to appreciate the work of Russia’s greatest poet. Each entry begins with a concise summary highlighting the key information about the poem’s origin, subtexts, and poetic form (meter, stanzaic structure, and rhyme scheme). In line-by-line fashion, Wachtel then elucidates aspects most likely to challenge non-native readers: archaic language, colloquialisms, and unusual diction or syntax. Where relevant, he addresses political, religious, and folkloric issues.
    Pushkin’s verse has attracted generations of brilliant interpreters. The purpose of this commentary is not to offer a new interpretation, but to give sufficient linguistic and cultural contextualization to make informed interpretation possible.

George Chapman (1559–1634) continues to cut a significant figure as a dramatist and translator of Homer, but his reputation as a poet has fared poorly. The common critical view has made him notorious as a writer of “difficult” poetry, to the point of being considered guilty of deliberate and wanton obscurity. Gerald Snare argues that the fact of the matter is quite the reverse: his supposed difficulty as well as the moral and philosophical imperatives that are assumed to dominate his work are in fact the construction of critics.
The Mystification of George Chapman is an argument against the accepted view of Chapman’s art. Snare examines Hero and Leander to determine the nature of its poetics and its relation to Mousaios and Marlowe; he reports on the imitative strategies of Ovid’s Banquet of Sense and declares that it deserves a reputation quite different from that of the most difficult poem in the English language; and he refers to Chapman’s own criticism found in the prefaces and notes often attached to his poems. The author finds Chapman’s poems were responses to the critical pressures inherent in adapting Greek, Latin, and contemporaneous English authors to his art, and he disputes the modern critical tendency to assume that doctrine, and not poetic practice, was the primary source of poetic energy in the Renaissance.

Published here in full are Ralph Waldo Emerson's nine poetry notebooks, the single greatest source of information about his creative habits in poetry.  Emerson kept rough drafts, revised versions, and fair copies of hundreds of poems in these notebooks, so that the genesis and development of poems both famous and obscure can be traced closely.  The notebooks have been remarkably little consulted, primarily because their unedited textual condition makes them difficult to use.  This edition makes them accessible to scholars by presenting a faithful transcription of each notebook, a detailed analysis of the history of each poem, an introduction, and a cross-referenced index.

For this edition, the editors have followed the high standards of textual practice developed for Harvard University Press's edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  That editorial approach makes possible a logical, clear presentation of material that Emerson often jotted down in segments or with multiple erasures and insertions.

 Because it will allow scholars to examine as never before the many facets of Emerson the poet, The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson will be a major impetus to study of the man considered by many to be America's greates thinker.

 Contrary to some scholars, tragic poetry did not die with the rise of melodrama in nineteenth-century theater or the glowing secularism spread by the proliferation of liberal-scientific philosophies. Rather, artists found alternative means to portray tragic situations.Thomas Hardy's Tragic Poetry convincingly argues that Hardy's lyric poetry and The Dynasts occupy a pivotal place in the development of modern tragic poetry and drama, crystallizing the tragic feeling that surfaces intermittently in Romantic and Victorian poems and plays.

Many scholars have noted the tragic forms and themes of Thomas Hardy's novels, but the tragic quality of his lyric poems has received less critical attention. Katherine Maynard remedies that situation by tracing the emergence of the Hardyean figure—tragically isolated against the backdrop of a stark landscape, neutral universe, or indifferent social milieu—through both a review of critical opinion about tragedy's place within modern literature and a survey of the frustrated attempts by major nineteenth-century poets to write tragic drama. Hardy's epic-drama The Dynasts is seen as a fulcrum work, bearing many of the flaws of its dramatic forebears but also illustrating his use of contemporary science and philosophy in the service of dramatic irony. Maynard examines a significant sample of lyrics to identify the contribution of Hardy's poetry to our understanding of tragic literature. She places the thematic and formal innovations of Hardy's tragic poetry squarely within the main lines of development from Wordsworth's Solitary to Beckett's lone figures waiting in a desert for a Godot who never arrives.

Ultimately, Thomas Hardy's Tragic Poetry calls for a rereading of Hardy's poetry as "tragic," arguing that he was able, paradoxically, to incorporate these literary and philosophical conventions of his time which some critics insist signaled the death of tragic literature. This study will prove fascinating for Hardyists, students of nineteenth-century literature, and all those interested in the ongoing development of poetry.