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Today the images of Robert Burns and Abraham Lincoln are recognized worldwide, yet few are aware of the connection between the two. In Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legends , author Ferenc Morton Szasz reveals how famed Scots poet Robert Burns—and Scotland in general—influenced the life and thought of one of the most beloved and important U.S. presidents and how the legends of the two men became intertwined after their deaths. This is the first extensive work to link the influence, philosophy, and artistry of these two larger-than-life figures. Lacking a major national poet of their own in the early nineteenth century, Americans in the fledgling frontier country ardently adopted the poignant verses and songs of Scotland’s Robert Burns. Lincoln, too, was fascinated by Scotland’s favorite son and enthusiastically quoted the Scottish bard from his teenage years to the end of his life. Szasz explores the ways in which Burns’s portrayal of the foibles of human nature, his scorn for religious hypocrisy, his plea for nonjudgmental tolerance, and his commitment to social equality helped shape Lincoln’s own philosophy of life. The volume also traces how Burns’s lyrics helped Lincoln develop his own powerful sense of oratorical rhythm, from his casual anecdotal stories to his major state addresses. Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns connects the poor-farm-boy upbringings, the quasi-deistic religious views, the shared senses of destiny, the extraordinary gifts for words, and the quests for social equality of two respected and beloved world figures. This book is enhanced by twelve illustrations and two appendixes, which include Burns poems Lincoln particularly admired and Lincoln writings especially admired in Scotland.  

Experience taught William Blake that \"Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.\" His brilliant achievements as a poet, painter, and engraver brought him public notice, but little income. William Blake in the Desolate Market records how Blake, the most original of all the major English poets, earned his living. G.E. Bentley Jr, the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but thereafter his fortunes declined. For his most ambitious commercial designs, he made hundreds of folio designs and scores of engravings, but was paid scarcely more than twenty pounds for two or three years' work. His invention of illuminated printing lost money, and many of his greatest works, such as Jerusalem, were left unsold at his death. He came to believe that his \"business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes.\" William Blake in the Desolate Market is an investigation of Blake's labours to support himself by his arts. The changing prices of his works, his costs and receipts, as well as his patrons and employers are expertly gathered and displayed to show the material side of the artistic career in Britain's Romantic period.

Since the recuperation to the canon of Scottish-born poet and physician James Grainger's work, scholars have concentrated on book 4 of his West Indian neogeorgic The Sugar-Cane (1764) as the portion of his oeuvre with the most contemporary relevance. Here Grainger finally turns from discussions of what seem entirely prosaic topics like the care of West Indian soil (book 1), threats to the cane crop (book 2), and the conversion of raw material to commodities (book 3) to take up a problem that if it strikes readers as equally unpoetic is at least of interest to twenty-firstcentury audiences. Here in book 4 the poem focuses on the African-born slave population that cultivated the sugar crop, a topic relevant to scholars working to track the lives of those subjected within an emerging modernity. In charging the poem with description after description of such phenomena, he intensified the georgic mode's formal challenge of exploiting the tension between the high and the low so as to reveal the high in the low.3 It was in his second book's rills on plantations' teeming insect life that he might most fully exercise his poetic power by using aesthetic form and figure to show that low West Indian topics could incite pathos in readers, in so doing integrating these themes into a metropolitan culture structured by sensibility.4 Hoping to burnish the poem and his reputation, Grainger revised the second book of the poem more substantively than any other. Between the 1762 manuscript draft of the poem...

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in relation to the political issues of his time. While much has been written on the politics of Pope, most of this relates to his possible Jacobite sympathies and his involvement in the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole in the 1730s. This biography covers the whole range of the poet's life, starting with his family background and the extended Catholic circle in which he continued to move, an important factor in the making of The Rape of the Lock. The book shows for the first time the continuing impact on his work of party divisions in London (deriving partly from his father's career as a merchant) and offers a fresh reading of The Dunciad as a commentary on City politics. It brings out a sustained commentary on the fortunes of the Tory party, especially the fate of Robert Harley, Matthew Prior and Francis Atterbury, which supplies a hidden subtext in the Epistle to Bathurst. The longstanding quarrel with the publisher Edmund Curll is seen to connect in unexpected ways with the public dramas of the day. While the book gives detailed attention to Pope's poetry and prose, exploring both major and minor texts, it draws on his own letters, together with the correspondence of friends such as Jonathan Swift, John Gay and Dr John Arbuthnot.

This film by Malcolm Hossick follows the life and times of the 18th century Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Burns came from a simple farming background but his poetry was soon accepted as of remarkable quality and he is now remembered as the ploughman poet. The film includes examples of his work and is followed by an overview of his work.

One of the most popular poets of her time, Charlotte Smith revived the sonnet form in England, influencing Wordsworth and Keats. Equally popular as a novelist, she experimented with many genres, and even her children's books were highly regarded by her contemporaries. Charlotte Smith's letters enlarge our understanding of her literary achievement, for they show the private world of spirit, determination, anger, and sorrow in which she wrote. Despite her family's diligence in destroying her papers, almost 500 of Smith's letters survived in 22 libraries, archives, and private collections. The present edition makes available most of these never-before-published letters to publishers, patrons, solicitors, relatives, and friends. As this volume was going to press, the Petworth House archives turned up 56 additional lost letters not seen in at least 100 years. Most are from Smith's early career, along with two letters to her troublesome husband, Benjamin. The archives also preserved 50 letters by Benjamin, the only ones by him known to have survived. Two letters from Benjamin to Charlotte are reprinted in full, and generous excerpts from the rest are included in footnotes, bringing a shadowy figure to life.

This comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Percy Bysshe Shelley features entries on all the major poems and prose works (including inspiration, composition and publication), Shelley's politics, relationships and travels, his representation in novels, drama, film and portraits, and his critical reception.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 668 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE seem only tangentially related to each other, and they do not employ enough of Milton's own language to help support the most important arguments. Donnelly quite smartly tears down reductive binaries about Milton, only to erect similarly reductive binaries, between modern and non-modern, or Protestant and nonProtestant . This treatment of religious history in particular has the unfortunate result of blurring the formative complexities in the debates between Presbyterians (with whom Milton had initially sided), the Independents, and the English Church. This history, in which hermeneutics deeply structure the theological and ideological tensions of these warring parties, deserves to be treated more precisely.Because of this, Donnelly's promising arguments are unable to realize fully their potential. Thomas Fulton Rutgers University The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography. ByRobert Crawford. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN978-0-691-14171-8. Pp. 480. $35.00. Sometimes it's best not to know too much about someone whose work you admire. In March of 1788, a week after the first of his twins by Jean Armour was buried, Robert Burns (1759-96) was having a sexual relationship with Agnes McLehose in Edinburgh. Burns returned to Jean in Mauchline later that month for the burial of the second twin, and in April he writes to say that he had officially married her. Later that year, Agnes' maidservant gave birth to Burns' son, while the poet continued a sycophantic, successful campaign to become an excise officer-a hated tax inspector for the British crown. Shortly thereafter he began writing republican poems (unpublished during his lifetime) in praise of the French Revolution. In this biography of the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford offers this explanation of the latter contradictions: \"The more the bard positioned himselfas a figure of regulatory authority, the more rebellious he became\" (351). There'sa more economical way to explain all of this: hypocrisy. Throughout this book, we do not see a single example of Robert Burns acting with moral courage when his character was tested. He groveled to obtain and preserve his tax job. He dallied sexually when he thought no one was looking and returned to Jean only when his affair with Agnes became hopeless. He privately played the radical when it was chic then abandoned his principles in public when it became dangerous. Crawford admits that Burns \"led something of a double life\"in politics and acknowledges the \"clashinginconsistencies\" in his treatment of women (364,294). These are understatements. Like an athlete whose early success brings out the latent weakness in his character, the triumph of Burns' Kilmarnock volume of poems (1786) clarified and intensified the personal shortcomings of the twentyseven -year-old poet. BOOK REVIEWS 669 Crawford's biography is strongest on the background of Burns' verse. He provides valuable insight into Burns' participation in the eighteenth-century version of global citizenship-Masonry-with its optimistic emphases on fraternity and equality. Crawford skillfullylocates Burns' eighteenth-century literary debts in his familiarity with Pope, Mackenzie, Shenstone, and others, and he gives a good account of the Scottish vernacular poets-Robert Fergusson and Allan Ramsaythat enabled Burns to develop his distinctive voice. For all these strengths, however, the books does not accomplish its primary goals: \"to offer a clear manageable account of [Burns'] life which gives some indication of what made him a great poet:' Instead of \"over-aestheticising Burns;' Crawford saysthat he intends \"to showhis political aswellashis lyricalimagination\" (11). The book is hampered by numerous small irritations. It spends too long describing the current state of buildings or landscapes that were familiar to Burns, such as today's Mauchline, whose residents (we learn) are \"warm, friendly, proud of their town's place in a history which takes in more than simply Burns\" (182). Then, some of Crawford's text is downright weird: he commends Burns for reading Adam Smith's Theory of MoralSentiments, published in 1759,the same year Burns was born: \"Few people today have read a work of philosophy published in the year of their birth\" (135). True enough. I suppose one could add that few people today have even read a work of philosophy. Why mention it? Crawford's credibility begins to decline...