Between 1867 and 1873, William Morris composed an astounding quantity of his best poetry – The Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise, and Love Is Enough, as well as several narratives and personal lyrics largely unpublished in his lifetime. In these, Morris repurposed the poetic forms and legends of prior European traditions to confront an urgent question: in the absence of the orthodox religious and political ideals that suffused past literature, how can a modern poet represent the struggles of his contemporaries toward meaningful lives? Is heroism still possible and, if so, what should be its qualities? Paradoxically, even as Morris’s answers celebrate myth and romance as models for present-day living, they assert the need for individuals to accept incompletion and partial defeat in the service of ultimate aims, recognizing that their lives form part of a communal, transhistorical pattern. Morris’s major poems offer his contemporaries not closure, but understanding, providing a form of psychological realism through myth and fantasy. Their preoccupations – the nature of love and the need for deferral – would accompany him through later embodiments of his convictions, including his final tragic epic Sigurd the Volsung and the visionary and utopian News from Nowhere.

This chapter marks out an arc of poetic productions in originary languages, starting in the colonial period with materials compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and following with productions in Nahuatl penned by Sor Juana. The chapter moves into the nineteenth century with the interventions of Faustino Chimalpopoca, and the attempts to “update” Nahua poetry by José Joaquín Pesado. A critical assessment of the role played by scholars such as Ángel María Garibay and his student Miguel León Portilla during the twentieth century leads into readings of contemporary poets who write in Indigenous languages. Women poets of this genre, such as Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda, are of particular interest.

This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.

Rambsy argues that the widespread recent use of persona poems by African American authors makes an examination of African American poetry in the context of autobiography especially timely. In the realm of poetry, Black writers have been integral to first-person portrayals of African American lives. An analysis of persona poems in relation to book-length volumes that concentrate on individual African American historical figures creates new scholarly possibilities. Indeed, book history and print culture studies concentrate on publications produced during the nineteenth century. Conversely, an examination of persona poems by Black poets reveals the viability of studying contemporary African American book history. This chapter addresses more than forty poets and sixty volumes of poetry and individual poems forming first-person narratives. Not comprehensive but focused, this study analyzes noteworthy contributions to the production of autobiographical narratives in African American poetry.

Locating a pedagogical impulse in the Reconstruction texts of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Madison Bell, and Albery Whitman, Stephanie Farrar’s “Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry during Reconstruction” identifies an emergent form of Black poetry pioneered in Reconstruction that has previously gone essentially unrecognized: long narrative verse that thematizes and analyzes the formation of Black citizenship. In laying claim to a form deeply linked with both national identity and whiteness, the chapter suggests that Black writers seized the cultural power of narrative verse to force a reckoning with the ongoing impact of slavery and the new mechanisms of racial hierarchy that replaced it. It draws attention to the form’s multiscalar cultural work as an analysis of, history of, didactic model for, and even enactment of modes of citizenship for Black Americans, and it illustrates the special role of the AME Christian Recorder in promulgating this poetry as an instrument of Black nationalism, attempting to counter attacks on black social and political life during Reconstruction and to theorize the conditions and components of freedom itself.

This chapter illuminates the authenticity and variety of the rhetorical styles of writing in a selection of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and the epyllion, Venus and Adonis. Focusing on bombast and repetition as two of the most frequent and representative rhetorical techniques that stand out in Shakespeare’s early writing, and addressing the earliest attack on Shakespeare’s writing craft, the chapter explores different ways in which Shakespeare turns rhetoric into an instrument that produces meaning. Critical attention is paid on examining how Shakespeare produces originality in collaborative and solo works and on radical uses of rhetoric for unrhetorical purpose. Comparing Shakespeare to some of the contemporaries that inspired his writing, like Marlowe, Greene, and Lodge, the chapter offers an insight into forms of imitation and creative resistance to existing models, on examples that have not yet been explored, and within the debate about styles in poetic and rhetorical treatises of the late Elizabethan period.