Hardcover. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.

Softcover. Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 2nd pr., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 462 pages. Illustrated in b&w. Includes bibliography. From rear cover: "From Kenneth Rexroth to the Czechoslovakian secret police, from Marianne Moore to the F.B.I., from Diana Trillling to Time magazine - Allen Ginsberg's work has always drawn a spirited response. Now, for the first time, these responses - remarks, reviews, and essays - have been collected in a single volume. Beginning with William Carlos Williams's early letters of support and ending with James Breslin's biographical analysis of 'The Origins of Howl and Kaddish', this collection reflects a full thirty years of praise, complaint, debate, and analysis of the work of one of the most innovative poets of our century". Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with gilt and black title on spine, 353 pages. WITH THE AUTHOR'S INSCRIPTION pasted to front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to the spine. "Cary Nelson performs an invaluable service to the reader by recovering the work of dozens of forgotten poets, especially women, blacks, and writers on the left, while making it clear that the texts we recover inevitably gain new meaning from their positioning within contemporary culture." Nicely illustrated in b&w and some color, mostly book jackets and title pages of books discussed. Some light pencil marking in margins.

Hardcover. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with faded gilt lettering on spine. 191 pages, b&w frontis. of Hawker. Small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.

Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 188 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a chipped, tape repaired dust jacket. Maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 266 pages. INSCRIBED BY SIPE on the front fly leaf to fellow professor Roger Mitchell. English majors are used to being told that Shakespeare frequently broke the rules of iambic pentameter, and that as he matured artistically, his usage became bolder and freer. Well, it isn't true. Shakespeare's iambics turn out to be extremely orthodox (which just makes all the more impressive the variations he was able to create within the rules). In 1968 Dorothy Sipe went to the remarkable labor of demonstrating this objectively through a painstaking analysis of over 13,000 lines of verse. She also supplied information I've never found anywhere else on the prosodic rules taught by poets to poets in Shakespeare's day. All this said, including a five star rating for the perfect achievement of its goal, the book is definitely not for everyone interested in Shakespeare's verse and methods. It is devoted to proving a highly specific case by means of many, many examples that non-specialists are likely to find tedious. But if you are deeply interested in some subjects -- Shakespeare's iambics, his coinages, and the history of English iambic technique -- it is well worth your time. Dust jacket tanned, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 266 pages. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, more often the voice of the soul than the socially marked self, speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. 'Souls Says,' the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and explores the force and beauty of contemporary lyric verse. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, William Pickering, 1st, 1835, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 298 pages. Black leather covers with gilt rules, faded gilt title on ribbed spine. All edges gilt. Covers with edgewear and the top 6th of the spine leather is gone. Marbled endpapers with bookplate inside front cover. Rear flyleaf with a chunk cut out. Interior is very good. Medieval and Renaissance French poetry, translated into English by an acclaimed poet, travel writer, historian, and painter. Louisa Costello (1799-1870), was an accomplished Anglo-Irish artist and prolific poet and author. She was also a fine miniature painter, and her illustrations show her exquisite sensibility. 4 beautifully hand-colored lithograph plates by the author. Not all copies contain these plates.

Hardcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 267 pages. In this original contribution to Elizabeth Bishop studies, Marilyn May Lombardi uses previously unpublished materials (letters, diaries, notebooks, and unfinished poems) to shed new light on the poet's published work. She explores the ways Bishop's lesbianism, alcoholism, allergic illnesses, and fear of mental instability affected her poetry--the ways she translated her bodily experiences into poetic form. Clean copy.

Softcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina , 1st, 1984, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, cream paper covers with red and black titling, 137 pages. There is underlining and notations to text in red ink to about half the pages.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 435 pages. By a judicious use of psychoanalytic concepts, Richard Onorato interprets the Wordsworth revealed in the poem The Prelude and relates the problems of poetic autobiography to those of personality. Spine of dj darkened. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 274 pages. Nine lectures. Contents: Introductory; What is Meant by Tradition; The Molpe; Drama; Metre; Poetic Diction; Unity and Organic Construction; The Heroic Age; Hamlet and Orestes; Poetry; Index. Clean copy. Top of cloth spine frayed. Remnants of dust jacket laid in.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 894 pages. Edited by Jay Parini and with poetry and poetry criticism by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor by Francis Murphy, Early African American Poetry, by Carolivia Herron, The Epic in the Nineteenth Century, by John McWilliams, Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism, by Dana Gioia, The Transcendentalist Poets by Lawrence Buell, Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Walt Whitman, by Donald Pease and many others, such as Dana Gioia, Gregory Orr, Ann Charters, William Pritchard, Helen Vendler, Edward Hirsch, and the work of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, the Beat poets and Native American poets and others. SIGNED BY PARINI on the title page. Bright, clean copy.

Softcover. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press , 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 305 pages. "In The Dark End of the Street, Maria Damon brings a new sensitivity to modern poetic criticism. She adds an important dimension to cultural theory, revealing the struggles of one group of artists as they address improtant questions about art, social life, and the oppression they encounter. Taking as her premise that the intensity of poetic language is an appropriate venue for representing the 'dark end of the street' of social pain, Damon foregrounds the work and lives of a number of modern American poets in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social 'outsiders."

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 346 pages. An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 248 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Charlestown MA, Printed and Sold By Samuel Etheridge, Revised Ed., 1810, Book: Very Good, Hardcovers, two volumes complete, 432 and 448 pages. bound in 3/4 calf, with red leather spine labels intact, bindings tight. New corrected edition. A collection of biographical studies on the life of important poets in the cannon of English literature, including: Cowley, Milton, Blackmore, Granville, Somerville, Thomson, Mallet, and Lyttelton. Written by Samuel Johnson, an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. With the original advertisement to the first edition. originally published in 1779-81. Light edgewear to covers, mild water stain to first 4 pages of Vol. 2, otherwise clean, mild foxing, very good set overall.

Hardcover. NY, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly soiled dust jacket with tanning to spine,name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st pbk., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Seattle, Wave Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 219 pages. A collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares 'I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.' Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde-among many others-into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet's need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Clean copy.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press;, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 123 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page and INSCRIBED by him on front fly leaf. Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning--metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Gluck, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means--on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it.