What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system – "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse", in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in "Poetry and Its Others", Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemp...

This book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read's words when he opened the "Surrealist Poems and Objects" exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years th...

"You must not take me at my word, / you must take me at my lack of word, / you must take me at my music". In "Nuncle Music", a sequence of monologues "spoken" by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Gareth Reeves presents the psychodrama of an artist fo...

This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but...

In this beautifully translated memoir Jacques Reda chooses the height of the mirabelle season in Lorraine for a long-delayed visit to his home town, Luneville. For France's distinguished "poete flaneur" – motorized for such occasions on his antiquate...

"To Hell with Paradise" is a wonderfully various and mature collection by a scrupulous and accomplished writer. It distills Gareth Reeves' collections "Real Stories" (1984) and Listening In (1993), adding previously unpublished poems and sequences, i...

A musician, musicologist, and self-defined "poet of research", Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist I...

The meteoric and turbulent career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote two masterpieces, "The Illuminations" and "A Season in Hell", and some wonderful short poems. At nineteen he then turned his back o...

For critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the great creative figures of the day, a painter and a poet of major stature. Yeats and the young Pound regarded him as an exemplary figure of solitary dedic...

Tadeusz Rozewicz is Poland's most popular and influential poet. Born in 1921, he belongs to the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. "What I produced is poetry for the horror-stri...