Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine

Over the ages, poetry has addressed significant and often urgent questions about the body, its representation, care and treatment. Including poems by writers from the dawn of the Early Modern period to the 21st Century, A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into nine thematic sections, including poetry from all periods as well as historical documents that help students place the poetry in its cultural contexts and covering such topics as: .The material body .Nerves, nervous disorders and psychology .Consumption: food, drugs and alcohol .Contagion and disease .Doctors, hospitals and the experience of medicine .Treatments and cures .The body in pleasure and pain .Evolution, genetics and reproduction .Ageing, dying and death A Body of Work is supported by a companion website offering further contextual essays, class discussion questions and visual material. Includes work by such poets as: Daniel Abse, Maya Angelou, Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, Ann Bradstreet, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, S.T Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roetke, Christina Rossetti, Jo Shapcott, Jonathan Swift, Michael Symmons-Roberts, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth.