Dreading and Hoping All


Book Description

Nicholas Alahverdian was forced to leave Rhode Island because he was becoming a publicity threat. And Florida was deemed far enough from Rhode Island to continue to keep him in exile where he could contact no soul who could help him. Alahverdian battled for over a decade of how and when to write his memoirs about growing up as an orphan and eventually attending Harvard University. Microbooks will provide that solution. It is easier for both author and reader. You can start to see that Nicholas Alahverdian's childhood and adolescence was complex. His experiences cannot merely be contained in one book. That's why he and his colleagues have embraced a non-linear history that details different aspects of his life as an orphan. Whilst he may no longer be the age of an orphan and is an adult, like all of us, with many successes and failures, he still considers himself to be on that vagabond train of life, living with a sense of unrehearsed spontaneity. It is this Dickensian spirit that most orphans possess, this craggy magic bursting within us that pushes us ever further to the next train stop of life, listening for that whistle to blow until we are swept away in the next enthralling adventure.




Here's Hoping


Book Description

'Here's Hoping'. The title is tongue-in-cheek. By saying “here's hoping” we usually fake hope because in reality we are not that hopeful. It is spoken without much confidence or hope at all and betrays uncertainty. We say it as we cast our wants and wishes, without much conviction, into the winds of fortune and the whims of the future, but without any sense of a guarantee for the desired result. “Here's hoping” speaks of longing that is not firing on all cylinders, of a dream or desire that is likely to stay that way, unrealized and unrequited. When we say it, we do not think “cross my heart and hope to die”. That kind of vigorous assurance and commitment is not usually prompting the phrase. It is less about crossing the heart and more about crossing the fingers. It is less about surety and more about good luck. To say “here's hoping” is to prepare oneself for potential disappointment. Ironically, it is more an expression of hopelessness than hope. This book gives the reasons we can say "Here's hoping" with assured anticipation and confidence




COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS


Book Description

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, ocasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision. Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available.




A Concordance to the Poems of W.B. Yeats


Book Description

Now it is possible for the first time to trace in a systematic way the language patterns of one of the greatest poets who have written in English, W. B. Yeats. Like A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold, the first of the Cornell Concordances that are under the general editorship of Professor Parrish, this volume was produced on an IBM 704 electronic data-processing machine. Computer technique has so advanced that the Yeats concordance includes punctuation and gives cross references for the second parts of hyphenated words. The frequency of every word in Yeats's poems is given, and an appendix lists all indexed words in order of frequency. The body of this book consists of an index of all significant words in Yeats, each word listed in the line or lines in which it occurs. The concordance is based on the variorum text of Yeats, edited by Alspach and Allt, and includes all variants that occur in printed versions of Yeats's poems.




The Living Image


Book Description

First published in 1972. The imagery of field sports - of hawking, hunting, shooting and fishing - and the associated imagery of warfare are a striking feature in Shakespeare's plays. The Living Image examines the nature of this imagery, considering it first in the light of the practices and techniques of Elizabethan field sports and weaponry and then its broader metaphoric significance in relation to the themes of the plays. The contemporary associations of the imagery - the inferences of female sexuality and waywardness from hawking imagery, for example, and the ideals of nobility and courage attached to images of hunting and war are all discussed.







A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse


Book Description

A selection of verses by William Shakespeare, which the author believes readers can derive meaning from without having background information from the work in which they originally appeared.




How Literature Works


Book Description

In How Literature Works important issues of literary theory are vividly illustrated by application to a wide variety of texts, many quoted and discussed at length. The theoretical aspects covered include the structural characteristics of literary texts, the psychology of the reading process and the social function of literature. The book also deals with such general questions as the relationship between literary texts and `objective' prose and the relationship between poems written to work as songs and those in which the lyric form is used to develop an argument: the singing and the speaking voice.




English Romantic Poetry


Book Description

Examines the Romantic period in poetry that includes the works of Byron, Shelley, Keats and others.




The Gyroscopic Transformation of Self Quest in W. B. Yeats’s Poetry


Book Description

Carrying a story to tell is the “ancient burden” of craftsmen, and it is one of the characteristics of the quest to find oneself, since a journey requires recognition of the aspects of self and anti–self. Like the speaker of his poems, W.B. Yeats has something to tell. His poetry draws nourishment from the battle between the dichotomies of self and anti–self, human and divine, mind and intellect, past and present, and body and soul. This book covers a selection of Yeats’s poems from 1889 to 1939, discussing them within the frame of the quest to find oneself and its gyroscopic transformation. The book illustrates that self is not a single entity, but has multiple layers, and it can be found within the quest in which it experiences a simultaneous transformation with every phase of the antithetical structure of gyroscopic movements. In addition, the way of the quest is cyclical; however, it is not a vicious cycle, since, in life, every end is a phase of a beginning and every beginning is a phase of an end.