The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her first major work and a poem written while she was still a teenager. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. The extensive historical documents place the poems in the context of Wordsworth’s life, contemporary politics, and the literary world of the early nineteenth century. Richard Matlak places the initial reaction to Poems in its historical context and explains the sea change in critical and popular opinion about these poems.
The poems were perceived as inappropriately personal and egotistical in the attention that the poet pays to “moods of mind.” The collection is now seen as containing some of the most enduring works of British Romantic poetry, and Wordsworth’s achievement in opening up new worlds of subject matter, emotion, and poetic expression is widely recognized. Poems was a revolutionary challenge to literary taste in revolution-weary times. Published seven years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s popular collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes shocked readers and drew scornful reviews.
Two previous volumes from this series have been published in English translation- Physis (Parlor Press, 2006) and Juliology (Counterpath, 2008).īrevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook by David Galef His work over the past twenty years constitutes a long meditation on the nature of language considered in relation to a mountain, Juliau, in south-central France. Nicolas Pesquès is the author of some fifteen volumes of poetry, the two most recent published by Flammarion. Subtle inter-relations of various powers, from the personal to the universal, create a meditative weave that accommodates both vivid imagery and philosophical speculation.Ī bit in the way that Cezanne used Mont Sainte-Victoire as an anchor that allowed him a greater range of artistic exploration, Pesquès returns again and again to his mountain to keep his free-wheeling linguistic experimentation well-grounded, creating a dynamic between concrete presence and abstract investigation that, by carefully avoiding equilibrium, keeps both poles in invigorating play. The overyellow of the title refers to the brilliant color of the fragrant English broom that flowers all over the mountain every June. Overyellow is part of a series that Nicolas Pesquès has been writing over the past twenty-five years beginning with a mountain that he sees outside his study window in the Ardèche region of France, Pesquès uses an evocation of nature to reflect upon the nature of language and its tendency to separate us from immanent experience. The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert Levine In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals. The result has been a theater of surprise, rich in stage action, and experimentally invigoratingĭemastes examines Guare’s tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting standup comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater.
Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright’s career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama
John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.