The Long Public Life Of A Short Private Poem

Thomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells--in vivid and compelling detail--of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years. Wyatt's sonnet becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII's court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the "best" English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.

“Meticulously maps the eddies and currents that have defined this vexing poem’s vexed history of neglect, rediscovery, and canonization . . . grippingly unusual.” —Renaissance Quarterly Thomas Wyatt didn’t publish “They Flee from Me.” It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in countless poetry anthologies. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across five hundred turbulent years. Wyatt’s poem becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII’s court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the “best” English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.

Thomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells--in vivid and compelling detail--of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years. Wyatt's sonnet becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII's court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the "best" English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.

This book explores the history of literature as a history of changing media and modes of communication, from manuscript to print, from the codex to the computer, and from paper to digital platforms. It argues that literature has evolved, and continues to evolve, in sync with material forms and formats that engage our senses in multiple ways. Because literary experiences are embedded in, and enabled by, media, the book focuses on literature as a changing combination of material and immaterial features. The principal agents of this history are no longer genres, authors, and texts but configurations of media and technologies. In telling the story of these combinations from prehistory to the present, Ingo Berensmeyer distinguishes between three successive dominants of media usage that have shaped literary history: performance, representation, and connection. Using English literature as a test case for a long view of media history, this book combines an unusual bird’s eye view across periods with illuminating readings of key texts. It will prove an invaluable resource for teaching and for independent study in English or comparative literature and media studies.

This book surveys English love poetry, primarily, though not exclusively, sonnets and sonnet sequences that show the influence of Petrarch, from the early sixteenth century to the publication of Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in 1621. It incorporates a range of new scholarship and thinking into narrative history, with a focus on particular poets including Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, Wroth, Walter Ralegh, and Shakespeare, as well as particularly notable poems such as "They flee from me", "Gascoigne's Woodmanship", and "The Ocean's Love to Cynthia". The self-absorption of Petrarchan lyricism is brought into a more populous environment and is linked to the ambitious and intense world of the English court, within which many of these poets lived and worked. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Petrarchan theme of love for a powerful but distant woman was literalized in the politics of the realm, in ways that the queen herself recognized and exploited. A final chapter offers a new model for the implied narrative of Shakespeare's sonnets.

"How were books in early modern England made, circulated, sold, stored, read, marked, altered, preserved, and destroyed? The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a stimulating account of the very newest work in the field, and an exploration of how new thinking might develop. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume combines lucidity, scholarly expertise, intellectual precision, and an imaginative structure that will enable contributors to show why the history of the book matters. This volume analyses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, and also considers critically how we can talk about the history of book"--

What does a place sound like – and how does the sound of place affect our perceptions, experiences, and memories? The Sound of a Room takes a poetic and philosophical approach to exploring these questions, providing a thoughtful investigation of the sonic aesthetics of our lived environments. Moving through a series of location-based case studies, the author uses his own field recordings as the jumping-off point to consider the underlying questions of how sonic environments interact with our ideas of self, sense of creativity, and memories. Advocating an awareness born of deep listening, this book offers practical and poetic insights for researchers, practitioners, and students of sound.

A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams. Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.” Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.