KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA AUTHOR · TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH · GERMAN POETRY
Heinrich Heine
Also known as: Heine Heinrich, H. Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered a member of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities—which, however, only added to his fame.
WHO stands on that cliff, like a figure of stone,
— from Poems
Most acclaimed
Confessions
Visionary, activist, and one of the most important religious thinkers and teachers of our time, Matthew Fox has devoted his career to unleashing the suppressed mystical and life-affirming traditions within Christianity. His theology of "Creation Spirituality" - notably the belief that we are born in "original blessing" - has reinvigorated the faith of countless Christians and earned him the headline-making censure of the Vatican, who officially "silenced" Fox in 1989 and precipitated his dismissal by the Dominican Order in 1993. In this always compelling memoir, Fox, now an Episcopal priest, traces the roots of his radical theology, from his 195Os childhood in Madison, Wisconsin, through formative years spent training in a late-sixties Paris rocked by revolutionary fervor, to taking on the Vatican (which he likens to standing in front of a train), to his most recent experiences as a leader of "rave masses" for urban young people. Written with his characteristic candor and insight, Confessions details Fox's spiritual, intellectual, political, and cultural evolution as an envelope-pushing member of a generation "bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over religion.". Fox's story mirrors the questions and concerns of those millions of contemporary seekers with a "passion for holiness"; a yearning for a Christian spirituality committed to social justice, feminism, and environmentalism; and a desire for ritual that heals, celebrates, and honors the gifts of being in each of us. Always relentlessly ahead of his time, Fox embraces his role as a "post-denominational priest," passionately exploring the present and future role of faith, church, and a spirituality grounded in the emphatic belief that finding God is still possible.
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.
Selected works
1959
Since his first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, which premiered in 1965, McNally has proven himself to be a trailblazing figure and unique voice in American theater, known for his exploration of gay themes and his chronicling of America's changing social attitudes over the past fifty years. His thirty-three plays, nine musicals, three operas, and seven scripts for film and television, are a testament to his astonishing commitment to writing. In Selected Plays, for the very first time, McNally collects a set of eight plays that he considers the most important of his oeuvre, including the Tony-nominated Mothers and Sons and the critically acclaimed And Away We Go, neither of which have been previously published. Introducing each play with a personal essay that recounts an anecdote or discusses an aspect of the play that proceeds it, McNally himself frames his own life in the theater. Selected Plays is a landmark publication, a memoir in plays from one of America's most highly regarded and best-loved playwrights.