Ekbert Faas

Here Ekbert Faas examines the complex interrelationships among the fields of early psychiatry, poetry, and aesthetics through an in-depth study of the Victorian dramatic monologue and its Romantic antecedents. Discussing the work of over thirty major and minor poets, he focuses on what Victorian critics viewed as an unprecedented psychological school of poetry related to early psychiatry and rooted in the poetic "science of feelings" (Wordsworth). This broad historical perspective enables Faas to redefine our current terminology regarding the dramatic monologue and to document the extent to which early psychiatry shaped the poetry, poetics, and general frame of mind of the Victorians. "In the nineteenth century, English poetry began to explore the psyche in ways contemporaries recognized as new. Wordsworth and Coleridge pioneered what Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning continued. Professor Faas painstakingly documents this, and reactions to it, with reference to simultaneous psychiatric work. Fascinating."--Encounter Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry

Retreat into the Mind

Robert Creeley

Irving Layton

The events covered by the letters collected here start with Robert Creeley's discovery of Irving Layton and focus on the turbulent circumstances surrounding the publication (by Creeley's Divers Press in Majorca) of In the Midst of My Fever, Layton's first book of poems not published at his own expense and the one that established him as a major poet. Irving Layton and Robert Creeley also recounts the cementing of avant-garde contacts between Canada and the United States through magazines such as Origin, Contact, and CIV/n.

The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978

Irving Layton and Robert Creeley

Maria Trombacco

In this biography Ekbert Faas pioneers a new kind of "life-writing." It tells its stories through the emotions, thoughts, and, above all, language of the dramatis personae, exchanging the authorial omniscience of traditional biography for an utter fidelity to sources. Allowing for contradictory viewpoints, anecdotes are told and re-told, letting Creeley reveal himself beneath the myths created by self-invention, wishful thinking, and, sometimes, distortion. Excerpts from autobiographical writings by the poet's first wife, Ann McKinnon, complete this intriguingly colourful and complex picture.

A Biography

Ann MacKinnon

The first fifty years in the life of a great American poet.

Ekbert (York University Faas, Toronto)

The Genealogy of Aesthetics

A Novel

Woyzeck's Head

Ted Hughes

The selected critical writings by Ted Hughes and two interviews.

Ekbert Faas

Books

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