Feelings can only be implied by lines of poetry, and have to be taken on trust by the reader, for there is no way of knowing whether the sentiments professed are actually felt by the claimant or not. The example of the poetic representation of feeling is an early poem by Lee Harwood, who was influenced by the methods of the New York poets of the mid-twentieth century. The three levels of feeling within the poem are brought to light by the considered act of viewing and re-viewing the poem from the standpoint of these three different forms of feeling. They are, firstly, the pain of bereavement and loss, secondly, the continuing sense of loss of selfhood which is the consequence of his blindness, and finally, the sexual deprivation which is the result of the poet's widowhood.

The physical qualities of the miscellany are described, attention being given to paper size and weight, handwriting and watermarks. On this basis, the collection may be divided into five sections, useful for the analysis of provenance. Items in the manuscript are analysed by type (verse, letter, translation, etc) and language (English, Latin, Italian, French and Spanish), and the results are presented graphically. The database used in this analysis is described, and a case presented for the use of similar databases in relation to other miscellanies, that are hard to catalogue conventionally.

While literary representations of indigenous peoples by non-Native writers now appear infrequently outside of popular genres, contemporary Native representations of Native orphan children have become common, which this study views as a literary trend growing out of widespread experiences of child removal and foster care, as well as of alternative child-rearing and kinship practices. In this chapter, key questions are posed to four works in which Native American orphan figures appear: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999). What “signifying capabilities” do Native American orphans have? What specific challenges to American and/or Native identity do authors respond to through their use of orphan figures? In what types of narrative or ideological processes are Native American orphans involved? The analysis suggests that authors use the figure of the orphan to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of American and Native nationhood, particularly in regard to their ability to accommodate, assimilate, or otherwise mediate difference. In the process, writers of fiction establish theoretical alliances or antipathies with multiculturalism as a model for American or Native social and political life.

Lyric poems are usually brief and compressed utterances, so it would be surprising if poets always wrote just a single poem on each theme or topic that interested them. A rough distinction between the sequence and the cluster is that the former is usually intended as a group from the outset. The former is given a distinct structure with recognisable phases in the Elizabethan sonnet sequences of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, or Edmund Spenser. Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion was published in 1595, and records the progress of his protracted courtship of the Irish heiress Elizabeth Boyle, when he was in his forties. A sonnet sequence usually has a gradual shift of atmosphere which becomes evident as it goes on.

This chapter focuses on John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), and Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1987) and The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2006), novels that remember earlier American and English novels to revise the conventions of the bildungsroman and challenge its conventional gender boundaries. In the process, the novels describe the kinship building of the protagonists, who develop complex understandings of kinship ties and a consciously affirmative stance on the value of “alternative family.” Because they are orphans, Irving’s and Gibbons’s protagonists are outsiders, but because they are white they may still lay claim to the dominant formulation of American identity; and the challenge they launch against the nuclear family ideal may be effectual precisely because they occupy a position of racial privilege.

The collection was assembled by William Parkhurst in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and later passed into the hands of the Finch family, at whose seat of Burley-on-the-Hill it was examined in the nineteenth century by Alfred J Horwood of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and in the early twentieth by the scholar Logan Pearsall Smith, who caused transcripts to be made of some of the material. These were used by later scholars, the manuscript itself being believed to have been destroyed by fire. The circumstances of this fire, and of the manuscript’s mysterious survival and subsequent discovery by I A Shapiro are described, as are its disappearance once again and rediscovery by Peter Beal. The survival was still not widely publicised and, until now, no detailed study of the Burley manuscript has been published.

This chapter introduces edited extracts from Eliza's Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652), a collection of poems and prose meditations, whose author can be recognised only by the name ‘Eliza’. Eliza's work expands the metaphor that the writing process mirrors the process of giving birth, exploring images of the mystical marriage, conception, labour, and birth in order to explain her authorship of devotional verse. Her work was clearly influenced by other writers of devotional verse, but particularly George Herbert.

This chapter looks at Vicki Feaver's 'Ironing', Charlotte Smith's 'Middleton Church' sonnet and Roy Fisher's 'Sign Illuminated', trying to say something specific about poetic meaning. The success of the poem as a whole depends upon the complementary fusion of the 'showing' part in the main body and the 'telling' part towards the end. The extent of the reader's enjoyment and grasp of the poem will have a lot to do with appreciating the means and skillfulness of that fusion. The two aspects (telling and showing) are equally important to the construction of the overall poetic effect, even though they are not of equal length. The poetic effect as a whole is tightly shaped and crafted by the poet, and it is natural for poetry readers to be curious about how that process works.

In autumn 1688 William of Orange, the Dutch stadholder (a title bestowed on the rulers of the Dutch Republic), issued a declaration stating his reasons for leading a fleet from the Netherlands to England. Gilbert Burnet was one of the most prominent defenders of William's invasion. Gilbert Burnet had apparently approached Aphra Behn, and asked her to pen an ode in praise of William of Orange. Elkanah Settle's 'Britain's Address to the Prince of Orange' carefully articulates that loyalist sentiment, while Aphra Behn's ode to Gilbert Burnet also resists being corralled into a defence of the Dutch ruler. Dryden's silence, and the reversal of his political and poetic fortunes, was a cause for gleeful satire from Williamite poets. In The Address of John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell mimics Dryden's voice and depicts the former laureate as willing to abandon James II.

This chapter offers analyses of African American orphans in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005), Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008). These writers employ genres such as the vampire novel and the historical novel of slavery to move beyond established paradigms of the modern black family. A transnational tendency affords a different inflection on questions concerning home, family, and nation; these novels also imagine feminist, queer, and multicultural forms of kinship that move beyond the nuclear family. However, these forms of kinship are not presented in exclusively utopian terms, for the novels explore the limitations as well as the possibilities of non-normative kinship and transracial, and even trans-species, adoption.

This chapter considers poems which are about an art object. The ekphrastic process provokes consideration of how poetic representation works, partly because it embodies the Ancients' view that there is an intimate relationship between pictorial art and poetry. This view is encapsulated in the saying that 'A poem is a speaking picture; a picture is a silent poem'. Ekphrastic poetry has a long history, and the earliest well known example is the description of the shield of Achilles in Book XIII of Homer's Iliad. The most frequently cited examples of ekphrasis in English poetry are: Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'; Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'; and W. H. Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts'. These poems effectively constitute the ekphrastic canon and critics conventionally use them to analyse and classify the various elements and devices seen in ekphrastic writing.