Hamilton, Ian

An account of the literary life of one of twentieth-century America's most widely read and most reclusive writers, J.D. Salinger.

Two sisters born to serve...The sorcerers of Lladrana have already Summoned three women to help fight the evil attacking their world. Yet their fourth Summoning brings the unexpected--twin sisters. And ones with strong ties to Earth.Both have a special gift to heal. But while Brigid Drystan has explored that gift through unorthodox means, Elizabeth has poured herself into getting a medical degree and denying her powers.Now, stuck in a strange land, fighting a plague sent by the Dark to weaken Lladrana, they must use all their resources to save lives. And one twin will risk her own on an experiment that might doom them both....

This Companion is both an alphabetically arranged reference work and, in its sum, a history, a map of modern poetry in English. From the last decade of the century, it offers a survey of the terrain, from 1900 to the present, and from Britain and America to New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, Trinidad, Zimbabwe - anywhere, in fact, where poets write in English. It charts the shift from 'poetry' to 'poetries' - from primarily British and American traditions to a rich diversity of younger poetic identities elsewhere. The only comprehensive work of its kind, it covers not just individual poets - some 1,500 of them - but also magazines, movements, concepts, and critical terms . Edited and introduced by Ian Hamilton, himself a notable poet, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English has the distinction of including among its contributors many other celebrated poet-critics, often in intriguing author/subject combinations. For example, Tom Paulin writes on Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid on Elizabeth Bishop, Clive Wilmer on Ezra Pound, Jon Stallworthy on Rupert Brooke, Peter Porter on Lawrence Durrell, Seamus Heancy on Robert Lowell, Femi Oyebode on Jack Mapanje, and Anne Stevenson on Sylvia Plath. These and other writers offer lively and opinionated critical assessments as well as biographical and bibliographical information. And, as one soon discovers, twentieth-century poets have lived far from humdrum lives. Twenty-seven here had nervous breakdowns, nineteen served time in jail, fourteen died in battle, three were murdered, one executed. One played hockey for his country. There were fifteen suicides, and one poet who staged his own death only to reappear, still writing poetry, under a new name. From Abse and Auden to Zaturenska and Zukofsky, this is an essential work of reference for students, lovers of poetry, and for poets themselves.

"Addressed to all readers of poetry, this is a wide-ranging book about the poet's role throughout the last three centuries. It argues that a conception of the poet as both primitive and sophisticated emerged in the 1750s. Encouraged by the classroom when English literary works began to be studied in universities, this view continues to shape our own attitudes towards verse. Whether considering Ossian and the Romantics, Victorian scholar-gipsies, Modernist poetries of knowledge, or contemporary poetry in Britain, Ireland, and America, The Modern Poet shows how many successive generations of poets have needed to collaborate and to battle with academia."--BOOK JACKET.

"Matthew Arnold had two lives. In his later years, he was Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic. In his youth, he was an impassioned lyric poet, deeply at odds with his "damned times". Arnold's poetic life - the life that gave us "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Empedocles on Etna" - was effectively over by the age of forty, when he began to devote all his energies to "purposeful" prose composition." "For about twenty years, however, he made efforts to resist his destiny, and this book is the story of that losing battle. As a biographical narrative, A Gift Imprisoned confronts a number of intriguing puzzles. Chief among these, of course, is the much-pondered Marguerite. Who was she: a dream-girl, an invention born of too much exposure to the novels of George Sand, or a real person met in Switzerland in 1848? Then there is Dr. Arnold himself: a devitalizing ogre or an inspiration? And, overarchingly, there is the matter of Arnold's attitude to his own gifts as a poet: Why did he so early on abandon the poetic life and settle for three decades of drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools? Was it really a fierce love of duty that took him down this path - or was it, rather, that he all along had insufficient faith in his own talent? And this leads to the question that matters most of all: How much faith do we and should we have in his talent?"--BOOK JACKET.