Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

Was the stylistic exuberance and formal ambition of twelfth-century classicizing prose linked to the unprecedented study of ancient poetry during this period? Why would aspiring prose writers have been nurtured largely in verse? Long accustomed to regard Byzantine interest in ancient poetry as culturally antiquarian in nature, we have been less alert to the formal lessons available to aspiring Byzantine authors, most of whom would go on to compose in prose instead of verse. By tracing the long history of poetry as the school of prose, this chapter draws examples from Eustathios’ Parekbolai or ‘commentaries’ on Homeric epic in a bid to illustrate attempts to render Byzantine prose more ‘poetic’. The author thus hopes to underline the reciprocal and often seamless relation between prose and verse in the twelfth century and what this may teach us about both during what is widely regarded as the most innovative period in Byzantine literature.

This chapter explores the link between poem and song by examining the relationship between texts of poems, their metrical properties, their performance modes, and their musical settings. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of choral support as an element of lyric and Michael Silverstein's analysis of metricalization in ritual serve as the main theoretical reference points. The chapter draws a distinction between, on the one hand, varieties of lyric that retain a historical link to song (such as Ancient Greek stanzaic forms of melos or the East Slavic chastushka) and, on the other, poems that evoke a potential sung performance, often as an invitation to set these poems to music (e.g., Schiller's “An die Freude”). The chapter then considers the political significance of collectively sung lyric with reference to the modern European revolutionary tradition, concluding with an examination of Fyodor Chaliapin's spontaneous performance of “Dubinushka” in Kiev in 1905. The formal properties of this working-class song, whose authors and origin are obscure but whose refrain was familiar to most audience members, contributed to a scene of secular social effervescence.

This methodologically oriented chapter starts by defining military concepts: strategy, logistics, tactics, operations. Sun Tzu himself did not distinguish between strategy and tactics, so this is a modern lens on Sun Tzu’s thinking. Next, a standardized five-part format is introduced, to be used to provide uniform structure for the fourteen chapters analyzing fourteen major Sun Tzu themes: (a) list of Sun Tzu passages chosen to illustrate a given theme (just a list, not the passages themselves); (b) Sun Tzu (1) analysis of Sun Tzu’s ideas pertaining to that theme; (c) further Sun Tzu (1) analysis of facets of the given theme that conditions of war and politics in Sun Tzu’s time suggest that Sun Tzu might plausibly have discussed, yet did not discuss; (d) Sun Tzu (2) and (3) "frontiers" of the theme, generalizing Sun Tzu’s relevant ideas in selected Sun Tzu (2) and (3) directions; (e) passages listed in Part (a) (in Griffith’s translation), often with brief commentary . The chapter ends by introducing notational conventions used throughout this study to refer to Griffith verses and passages.

This methodologically oriented chapter starts by defining military concepts: strategy, logistics, tactics, operations. Sun Tzu himself did not distinguish between strategy and tactics, so this is a modern lens on Sun Tzu’s thinking. Next, a standardized five-part format is introduced, to be used to provide uniform structure for the fourteen chapters analyzing fourteen major Sun Tzu themes: (a) list of Sun Tzu passages chosen to illustrate a given theme (just a list, not the passages themselves); (b) Sun Tzu (1) analysis of Sun Tzu’s ideas pertaining to that theme; (c) further Sun Tzu (1) analysis of facets of the given theme that conditions of war and politics in Sun Tzu’s time suggest that Sun Tzu might plausibly have discussed, yet did not discuss; (d) Sun Tzu (2) and (3) "frontiers" of the theme, generalizing Sun Tzu’s relevant ideas in selected Sun Tzu (2) and (3) directions; (e) passages listed in Part (a) (in Griffith’s translation), often with brief commentary . The chapter ends by introducing notational conventions used throughout this study to refer to Griffith verses and passages.

Here excerpts are given from an Anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, and from the Life of Cuthbert written by Bede, both in verse and prose. Two stories are chosen, one about Cuthbert meeting the otters on the beach, and the other about him foreseeing the death of a worker on the monastic estate.A brief excerpt from Alcuin’s poem on the bishops and saints of York shows how he condenses into two hexameters one of the stories recorded by Anonymous and Bede.

This article illustrates the paradoxical position that Molière occupies in contemporary English-speaking culture: at once absent and omnipresent, little known by the general public but enjoying a select place on the British stage. Molière’s success in Britain over the last few decades has been due to the use of strategies to reduce the gulf that sometimes separates the original plays and the expectations of the English-speaking public. Numerous translators have sought to accentuate their socio-political relevance. However, their relocalisation and the addition of modern cultural references have often been merely a pretext for increasing their burlesque content and introducing quips and puns, thereby making them more commercial. Domestication can be seen also in the transformation of the alexandrine into a verse form that emphasises rhyme to add still more verbal humour. Of the ten adaptations produced by the National Theatre in London, each in its own way contributes to the debate surrounding the ethos of translation. Should Molière translations preserve the original or endlessly reinvent themselves to make the public laugh, as the dramatist himself sought to do? Most translators from the second half of the twentieth century knew to which camp they belonged.

Chapter 1 starts from conversation’s intimate verbal connection with verse. Conversation – a mode of social care for Victorians – inscribes not only persons but also other beings and things in figures turning together, creating a verbal way of keeping company with others that many nineteenth-century poets explored through the virtual medium of verse. Lyric written with conversation in mind is sociable, as Empson and Adorno both claimed. To create conversation in modern verse requires eliciting voice from text: both figuring voice and configuring it by prosodic means, in David Nowell Smith’s useful account, encouraging an experience of reading that expands the sense of a single, individual voice to accommodate unlike others. Conversing in verse is a way of redesigning social space, at least in a poem. The chapter turns, in its final third, to the considerable body of twentieth-century philosophical writing addressing the ethical and political importance of conversation, especially the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot as they respond to the poetry of Paul Celan.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.

Meredith’s novels abound in sentences, understood not just as the verbal form that contains a subject and a predicate, ending in a period, but as sententiae or maxims, which express a general truth or opinion in striking and memorable terms. A long-time feature of argument and rhetoric, sententiae are intimately associated with the development of oral and written prose, though their presence in Meredith’s work has led to the accusation that his novels are excessively poetic. This essay adopts a genealogical approach to Meredith’s style by tracing the development of his earliest sententiae to their recognizably mature form. With roots in the “wisdom” tradition in ancient prophecy and philosophy, Meredith’s sententiae reflect an ideal of cultivated speech historically associated with intelligent conversation and drama, which he then assimilated to narrative fiction. The singularity of the Meredithian sentence – a metaphorically dense and syntactically complex assertion that blends idiosyncratic expression with judgments of common sense – thus arises from synthetic hybridity, overlaying didacticism with description and intellection with image.

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.

In 1936, the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects was held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, displaying the most diverse array of material objects in the history of surrealist exhibitions to date. André Breton elaborates on this aspect of the exhibition in his enigmatic “Crisis of the Object” which was written as a text to accompany the exhibition catalog. While it has been widely read as an interpretation for a scientific reckoning of surrealism, this chapter shows that “Crisis of the Object” was rather a reflection on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and his materialist conception of poetry published fifty years before. A reconsideration of Breton’s theory of objects through the recent lens of new materialism offers insight into how the surrealist engagement with things in the 1930s was – and still is – revolutionary in that it sought to propose an antianthropocentric poetics of the world.

Chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho sets out the evidence for Sappho’s use of metre, showing its position within the tradition of Greek poetic metre as a whole, as well as the sparse evidence that survives for her music.

This chapter builds on the pioneering work of John Wilson Foster (‘Encountering Traditions’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. John Wilson Foster (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997) and John Waters (‘Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772–1820’, in Romantic Generations, ed. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan (Lewisbury: Bucknell University Press, 2001)), both of whom considered the ways in which English-language poets of the eighteenth century wrote about Irish land and landscape. The essay looks at poems written to celebrate the world of English-speaking owners of Irish farms and estates – vistas and pleasure gardens for instance – and poems about activities taking place in the countryside – gardening, farming, hunting, and team sports. Verses praising the wildness of untamed nature are also considered as are poems on violent events such as storms and extended frosts. The poems raise practical, theological, and aesthetic issues in both pastoral and mock-pastoral modes as well as in the emerging genre of ‘picturesque’ poetry. The chapter also considers popular poetry, such as demotic verse about country life, and indicates that, for some poets – Goldsmith and Laurence Whyte for instance – life in rural Ireland was not always idyllic.

The manuscript of collected verse and prose poems Bolaño began assembling in 1993 under the title “Fragmentos de la Universidad Desconocida,” published posthumously in 2007 as The Unknown University, marks a pivotal moment in his career. Bringing to a close his lifelong aspiration to gain recognition primarily as a poet, its three-part construction, with Antwerp at its center (recycled and retitled as People Going Away), signals a decisive transition and reorientation of Bolaño’s writing priorities over the course of his final decade. Positioning as “one of the wings / of the Unknown University!”–but only one–the verse poetry he had loved all his life but come to find as limiting as Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud had found it to be a century-and-a-half earlier, The Unknown University sets the stage for one of the most productive decades any writer has known. Following quite logically on the farewell to poetry as verse that is The Unknown University, Bolaño published only three years later, in 1996, the breakthrough year of his career, the condensed, prose-poetic fiction of Nazi Literature of the Americas and the novel of poetic apprenticeship this is in fundamental respects both its companion text and its sequel, Distant Star.

This chapter begins the text-critical study at the heart of the book. It analyzes the relationship between two different and redundant types of text-segments in the extant text, chapters (ādhyāyas) and topics (prakaraṇas). The chapters are shown to have been added at a later time. So, too, the verses that conclude each of these chapters in the extant text are shown to have been added along with the chapter segments. This chapter goes on to argue that all, or nearly all, of the verses in the text are later additions. Other additions made at the end of certain chapters are identified.