A Voyage To Pagany

Originally published in 1928 by Macaulay.

Start a journey through Europe in 'A Voyage to Pagany', a unique fictional work by William Carlos Williams, the influential father of beat poetry. This narrative takes readers on an odyssey across different cities and landscapes, from Paris to Florence, Rome to Venice, Vienna to Geneva. Through Williams' distinct style, the reader is immersed in the rich tapestry of each destination, experiencing the sights, sounds, and encounters that shape the protagonist's voyage. From the ancient springs of purity to the routine of everyday life, from the grandeur of Viennese palaces to the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, this literary voyage is a sensory exploration of Europe's vibrant tapestry.

For this definitive collection of Pound's Literary Essays, his friend (and English editor) T. S. Eliot chose material from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations (1920), How to Read (1931), Make It New (1934), and Polite Essays (1937). 33 pieces are arranged in three groups: "The Art of Poetry," "The Tradition," and "Contemporaries." Eliot wrote in his introduction: "I hope that this volume will demonstrate that Pound's literary criticism is the most important contemporary criticism of its kind . . perhaps the kind we can least afford to do without . . . the refreshment, the revitalization and 'making new' of literature in our time."

William Carlos Williams was an inventive writer never confined by any static genre or aesthetic postulate. In this authoritative study, Bernard Duffey recognizes that literary dynamism as he approaches the full breadth of Williams's work--including his poetry, prose, fiction, and drama--as an interrelated and interdependent web of writing. The result, the first truly comprehensive examination of a major American author and his kinetic art, will interest students and scholars of Williams, American literature, and modern poetry and criticism. Central to Duffey's study is a critical framework based on Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives and the perception of the poet as an agent working in relation to a "scene" and its content--in this case, the geographical and cultural locale that Williams clung to. Williams's work, Duffey argues, was informed by the dramatic sense of himself as a literary actor seeking embodiment of a dynamic, altering whole and his present condition of being. Ultimately, he stresses, the writer was more engaged in expressing literary action than in forging literary objects. Duffey amplifies this critical view through a close reading of specific works. Examining Williams's principal writings in the lights that seem most immediate to them, he tackles a variety of themes: the pervasiveness of scene in In the American Grain and the fiction; the role of agent or poetic person in Kora in Hell, A Voyage to Pagany, Paterson, and Pictures from Brueghel; the function of poetic agency in the short poems, and of poetic action in Williams's drama.

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. The essays, gathered in one volume for the first time, include commentaries on Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Mary Butts, George Bowering, Louis Dudek, Christos Dikeakos, and J. S. Bach. Blaser emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s having studied under legendary medieval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz and having been a major participant in the burgeoning literary scene. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world—and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years.

William Carlos Williams first spoke to the issue of form shortly after the publication of “The Wanderer” in 1914—his move to vers libre—and didn’t stop talking about form until his death in 1963. His poetry shows, decade after decade, persistent formal innovation. Bruce Holsapple’s The Birth of the Imagination relates the form, structure, and content of Williams’s poetry to demonstrate how his formal concerns bear upon the content, namely, how form testifies to a vision that the style verifies. Tracing the development of Williams’s work from Poems in 1909 through The Wedge in 1944, Holsapple aligns emerging aesthetic concepts and procedures with shifts in Williams’s writing to disclose how meaning becomes refigured, affecting what the poems “say.” While focusing primarily on Williams’s experimental works, including the novellas, this innovative study charts how significant features in Williams’s poetry result from specific imaginative practices.