Poetry History category: 2770 books

Here, for the first time, is a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth...

Representing the best of ten books and twenty years' work, Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into his strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, taken in by his...

'Tennyson', wrote T. S. Eliot, 'has the finest ear of any English poet since Milton,' and his verse remains unrivalled in its combination of verbal richness, emotional depth and intellectual engagement. Tennyson drew on classical and medieval legends in poems like 'The Lotos-Eaters' (1832) and 'The...

Tennyson had a life-long interest in the legend of King Arthur and after the huge success of his poem 'Morte d'Arthur' he built on the theme with this series of twelve poems, written in two periods of intense creativity over nearly twenty years. Idylls of the King traces the story of Arthur's rule,...

Geoffrey Chaucer is rightly regarded as the Father of English Literature. His observant wit, his narrative skill and characterization, his linguistic invention, have been a well from which the language's greatest writers have drawn: Shakespeare, Pope, Austen, Dickens among them. A courtier, a trade...

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect...

Having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory in parts one and two of the Divine Comedy, Dante ascends to Heaven in this third and final part, continuing his soul’s search for God, guided by his beloved Beatrice. As he progresses through the spheres of Paradise...

This pivotal book of the Aeneid has Aeneas - like Odysseus in Odyssey XI - visiting the Underworld. He is poised, as it were, between the world of his 'Homeric' past, the wanderings he has undergone in the poem's first half, and the destiny mapped out for his descendants, which culminates in the age...

Discover Dante's original Inferno in this modern and acclaimed Penguin translation. Describing Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins....

In this book Andrew Motion has made his own choice from his outstandingly fine and varied body of work. Dramatic monologues, elegies, poems of social and political observation, love lyrics - all are part of this important poet's repertoire. Andrew Motion's concern for the extremes of human experience...

From one of today's most distinguished critics, a beautifully written exploration of one of the twentieth century's most important literary critics Are literary critics writers? As Michael Wood says, "Not all critics are writers—perhaps most of them are not—and some of them are better...

This volume replaced Ted Hughes's Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes's writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, What is the Truth? and Season Songs.

JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many...

In the author's own words, “These are classics in my own mind.” Readers beware! Some of you will be shocked by parts of this book. Vegetarians may be disturbed by turkeys on the menu, or kiddies in a witch's freezer. Others could well get excited by all the chopping, reaping and...