Comparative Readings of Poems Portraying Symbolic Images of Creative Genius: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Teixeira de Pascoaes, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Donne, John of the Cross, Edward Young, Lao Tzu, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman

This cluster of comparative essays opens up new critical and cultural vistas, as much for the English-speaking reader as the Portuguese scholar. Dr. Ceia's foreword sets out with absolute clarity the objectives and scope of his study in which he will examine the way that poetic imagination is treated by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, arguably Portugal's greatest living poet, as well as by other major writers of the Western and Eastern traditions. This cluster of comparative essays opens up new critical and cultural vistas, as much for the English-speaking reader as the Portuguese scholar. The author's foreword sets out with absolute clarity the objectives and scope of his study, in which he will examine the way that poetic imagination is treated by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, arguably Portugal's greatest living poet, as well as by other major writers of the Western and Eastern traditions. In chapter one, basing himself on the theories of Freud and Jung, and taking his examples from a wide-ranging if not eclectic selection of writers (Ted Hughes, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney among others), Dr Ceia breaks new ground in his quest to explore the ways in which his subjects h