Good poetry for children is rare. Few collections, few single poems in fact, survive beyond a few years of popularity. There are exceptions — the poetry and verse of Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear come to mind. Still rarer is successful children's poetry by a poet known equally for other work, such as Christina Rossetti.These verses — deceptively simple, light, often like a nursery rhyme in character & ...
Few volumes of poetry in the English language have enjoyed as much success with both literary connoisseurs and the general reader as A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Scholars and critics have seen in these timeless poems an elegance of taste and perfection of form and feeling comparable to the greatest of the classic. Yet their simple language, strong musical cadences and direct emotional appeal have won these work ...
Great title poem plus «Kubla Khan,» «Christabel,» 20 other sonnets, lyrics, odes: «Frost at Midnight,» «The Nightingale,» «The Pains of Sleep,» «To William Wordsworth,» «Youth and Age,» more. All reprinted from authoritative edition. ...
One of the most famous poems in the English language, «The Raven» first appeared in the January 29, 1845, edition of the New York Evening Mirror. It brought Edgar Allan Poe, then in his mid-30s and a well-known poet, critic, and short story writer, his first taste of celebrity on a grand scale. «The Raven» remains Poe's best-known work, yet it is only one of a dazzling series of poems and stories that won him an enduring place in world lite ...
The best-known works of more than 60 British and American poets, written over a period of nearly 400 years, comprise this superb collection of verse. Focusing on poems of faith — inspiring, comforting, and profound works with religious themes and ideals — the volume includes «Holy Sonnets» by John Donne, Ben Jonson's «To the Holy Trinity,» «Paradise» by George Herbert, «On His Blindness» by John Milton, as well as poems ...
In the pantheon of English poets, Shelley has long occupied a lofty place, his poems as admired for their profound thought and subtle perceptions as for the music and fervor of their language. His life as well as his poetry embraced the passions, ideals, and causes of Romanticism, whose emergence and early influences coincided with the dates of his own brief life (1792-1822). This selection of many of Shelley’s best-known and most repr ...
Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) called himself «an Aeolian harp strung to every wind of heaven.» His first volume of poems, entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in 1786. An immediate success, it established Burns's poetic reputation, which has grown over two centuries to the point where he is not only the Scottish national poet but the object of a cult unique in British poetry. The present volume contains 43 o ...
Milton's great 17th-century epic draws upon Bible stories and classical mythology to explore the meaning of existence, as understood by people of the Western world. Its roots lie in the Genesis account of the world's creation and the first humans; its focus is a poetic interpretation «Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe / With loss o ...
The Victorian poet Robert Browning (1812 –1889) is perhaps most admired today for his inspired development of the dramatic monologue. In this compelling poetic form, he sought to reveal his subjects' true natures in their own, often self-justifying, accounts of their lives and affairs. A number of these vivid monologues, including the famed «Fra Lippo Lippi,» «How It Strikes a Contemporary,» and «The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Sain ...
