Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry

This is a work of mature scholarship; its references inform, delight and open new avenues of connectedness at every turn. It is also unpretentiously, generously written: the speaking voice and personal enthusiasms of the best kind of teacher hold interest across an impressively broad span of poetic analysis ... It is as persuasive an advocacy of the pleasure of poetry as I have read in years. * Studies in Hogg and his World *
Enjoyable new book ... A ranging and attentive book, engaging in its particulars and suggestive in its implications. * The Review of English Studies *
Stafford argues thoroughly and persuasively ... This book provides a fascinating model for readers of any poem that engages another across cultural and chronological boundaries, and for literary criticism as a whole. * Scottish Studies Review *
Starting Lines is a welcome contribution to a trend in which Scottish and Irish literatures are considered on their own terms ... Stafford offers refreshing close analysis ... The argument is lucidly presented, with careful structuring and logical progression signaled by useful transitions. Helpfully, each chapter opens with the full texts the poems being considered, and in each case the poet's ideas and practices regarding quotation are fully examined. * Scottish Studies Review *
The introduction lays out a thorough, intelligent discussion of eighteenth-century constructions of originality, its associations with independence, and its role in Romantic aesthetic theory. * Scottish Studies Review *
For anyone interested in poetic allusion the book is essential reading ... a challenging, acute and sometimes beautifully written account of that texture of historical, cultural, and textual relations that makes literary history. * Notes and Queries *
One can only admire the scholarship and learning on display here ... one's understanding of the book's poems is enormously enhanced. * Notes and Queries *
It is a tribute to the interest of this book that one could wish it considerably longer ... The author evidently set out to initiate avenues of approach to a fruitful territory of understanding between the three nations; and in this she has been triumphantly successful. * The Wordsworth Circle *
The background reading is both wide-ranging and detailed, so that the poems are located on a series of interlocking maps, national and international. Nor does the author hesitate to venture into terra incognita. * The Wordsworth Circle, *