Canzoni & Ripostes presents an invigorating exploration of early 20th-century poetic innovation, capturing the dynamic shifts in literature as artists grappled with modernity. This anthology intertwines lyrical expressions and pointed retorts, reflecting the unique interplay of tradition and rebellion characteristic of the era. From evocative canzoni to striking ripostes, the collection offers a comprehensive view of evolving poetic forms and the dialogue between the established and the av...

Canzoni & Ripostes brings together two formative volumes of early modernist poetry, where inherited lyric forms encounter an exacting new economy of image and cadence. The collection ranges from elaborate, allusive canzoni and dramatic monologues to terse urban sketches, translations, satires, and imagistic fragments. Its most striking poems test how compression, colloquial sharpness, and visual precision might renovate English verse, while its engagement with Provençal, classical, and con...

The history of the philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers? Who will tell us of the circulation of Descartes, who read the book and who understood it? Or do philosophers, like the mythical people on the island, take in each other’s washing? Are they the only readers of each other’s books? For I take it, a man who understands philosophy is inevitably irritated into writing it. The few who have learnt the jargon must repay themselves by em...

Reflections on Violence was an explosive and controversial book in 1906, and it remains so today. In it, Georges Sorel rejects the decadence of bourgeois democracy and calls for a heroic vitalism of the working class, to be brought about by any means necessary, including violence.Sorel chastises the republicanism and parliamentary socialism of his day, but his insights apply to any vanguardist movement, making him of interest beyond the left, and a precursor to fa...

Sorel developed an original and provocative theory on the positive, even creative, role of myth and violence in the historical process. Sorel was a civil servant who fervently believed that only the clearest and most brutal expression of class war could effect lasting social change. This, his most important work, is a passionate outcry for the socialist overthrow of society.Reflections on Violence first appeared as a series of articles in Le Mouvement Socialiste in...

Enter a mystical, visionary realm where striking spirituality collides with fierce social critique through mesmerizing, lyrical verse. This collection explores the intense duality of human nature, contrasting the pure light of divine inspiration with the dark shadows of oppression. The vivid, almost hallucinatory imagery creates a powerful atmosphere that challenges conventional morality and organized religion. Each poem acts as a prophetic warning and a desperate plea for the liberation o...

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around...

Roger Scruton is one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time, whose often provocative views never fail to simulate debate. In Modern Philosophy he turns his attention to the whole of the field, from the philosophy of logic to aesthetics, and in so doing provides us with an essential and comprehensive guide to modern thinking.

In Memoriam A.H.H. is a long poem by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna in 1833, but it is also much more. Written over a period of 17 years, it can be seen as reflective of Victorian society at the time, and the poem discusses many of the issues that were beginning to be questioned. It is the work in which Tennyson reaches his highest musical pe...

Keats is one of the major figures in the second generation of Romantic Poets and was considered by Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. The preoccupying themes of Keats' poetry are love, art, sorrow, the natural world and thenature of the imagination. However, his poetry is often also indirectly critical of conventional political, religious, and sexual beliefs. This collection contains pieces from different periods in his short life, from his earliest verse to his la...

Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil is a landmark of modern lyric poetry, a deliberately unsettling sequence that transforms sin, decay, erotic longing, urban spleen, and spiritual aspiration into works of severe formal beauty. Written largely in classical meters and rhymed structures, its poems wrench the inherited language of Romanticism toward Symbolism and modernism, discovering correspondences between perfume, music, color, and moral experience. Its scandal lies not merely in its...

The Great Philosophers traces the biggest and most influential thoughts in philosophy's long stride through history, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and Early Romans, the first philosophical thinkers in the West, to whom much is owed.How their concerns became the concerns of those who followed is clearly laid out, as is the way their answers shaped what we now recognize as philosophy. The medieval philosophers are also represented, combining their religi...