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Selected Poems: Selected Poems And Prose
by Charles-Pierre BaudelaireThe poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.
Selected Poems
by Subramania Bharati Usha RajagopalanIn the melody that is heard all day long In the teeming city and in nature's wilderness In all these notes I have lost myself.' Honoured at a public function when he was a mere boy of eleven with the title 'Bharati' (one blessed by Saraswati the Goddess of Learning) C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) is renowned as the herald of the renaissance of Tamil literature. The simplicity and lyricism that marked his poetry reflect a clear shift in sensibility and craft from the classical tradition which had adhered to strictures of style, imagery and language for over 2000 years. Ranging from the fiercely patriotic and the deeply romantic to the humbling intensity of devotion and the sharp criticism of self and society, this selection brings together poems that reflect the very essence of Bharati's broad philosophy. Usha Rajagopalan's stellar translations echo the lyricism and transformative power that have lent Bharati's poetry their distinctive enduring quality.
Selected Poems
by Robert Bringhurst"Robert Bringhurst may well be the poet we have all been waiting for, one who can reclaim for poetry the dignity, wit, brilliance, and wisdom it has recently appeared to have mislaid. He is without doubt a major poet, not only in the context of Canadian letters, but in that of all writing of our time."-PoetryInspired by Eastern, pre-Socratic, and Native American art and ideas, Robert Bringhurst's Selected Poems gathers work from fifteen volumes and embodies music, ecology, mythology, and philosophy. As he writes, "When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens." Bringhurst's passion for books and words extends to the design and typography of this gorgeous volume."Essay on Adam"There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,fear, we have tried. It is useless. The fifth,nothing happened, is dull. The choices are these:he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between themis only an issue of whether the demonswork from the inside out or from the outsidein: the onetheological question.Robert Bringhurst is a poet, typographer, and linguist, well known for his award-winning translations of Haida storytellers. His manual The Elements of Typographic Style is one of the world's most influential texts on typographic design. He lives on Quadra Island, British Columbia.
Selected Poems
by Joseph Brodsky Edwin Arlington Robinson Robert FaggenEdwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns ("Tilbury Down" and "The Mill"), the tyranny of love ("Eros Turrannos" and "The Unforgiven"), and unspoken, unnoticed suffering ("The Wandering Jew", and "Isaac and Archibald"). In addition, the fictional characters he created in "Reuben Bright", "Miniver Cheevy", "Richard Cory", and the historical figures he brought to life -- Lincoln in "The Master" and the great painter in "Rembrandt to Rembrandt" -- harbor demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an Introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to new readers.
Selected Poems
by Gwendolyn BrooksThe classic volume by the distinguished modern poet, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, showcases an esteemed artist's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world.
Selected Poems
by Robert BrowningRobert Browning was one of the greatest of English poets, whose intense and original imagination enabled him to transform any subject he chose - whether everyday or sublime - into startling memorable verse. In his work he brought to life the personalities of a diverse range of characters, and introduced a new immediacy, colloquial energy and psychological complexity to the poetry of his day. This selection brings together verse ranging from early dramatic monologues such as the chilling 'My Last Duchess' and the ribald 'Fra Lippo Lippi', which show his gift for inhabiting the mind of another, to the popular children's poem 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' and many lesser known works. All display his innovative techniques of diction, rhythm and symbol, which transformed Victorian poetry and influenced major poets of the twentieth century such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
Selected Poems
by Lawrence Buell Henry Wadsworth LongfellowLongfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works--Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha--as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems.
Selected Poems
by Robert BurnsThis selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic Auld Lang Syne, the romantic A Red, Red Rose, and the patriotic Scots What Hae. As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range - from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.
Selected Poems
by John BurnsideOver seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. In this Selected Poems we can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and continuity.This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes intimate, resonant, exquisite music.
Selected Poems
by Lord ByronDescribed as 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron was the quintessential Romantic. Flamboyant, charismatic and brilliant, he remains almost as notorious for his life - as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller - as he does for his literary work. Yet he produced some of the most daring and exuberant poetry of the Romantic age, from 'To Caroline' and 'To Woman' to the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, his exotic Eastern tales and the colourful narrative of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that made him famous overnight and gave birth to the idea of the brooding Byronic hero.
Selected Poems
by Christopher Carduff John Updike Brad LeithauserThough John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers of prose, both his first book and his last were poetry collections, and in the fifty years between he published six other volumes of verse. Now, six years after his death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best from Updike's lifework in poetry: 129 witty and intimate poems that, when read together in the order of their composition, take on the quality of an unfolding verse-diary.Among these poems are precocious undergraduate efforts (including the previously unpublished "Coming into New York"), frequently anthologized midcareer classics ("Seagulls," "Seven Stanzas at Easter," "Dog's Death"), and dozens of later works in a form that Updike made his own, the blank-verse sonnet. The poems range from metaphysical epigrams and devotional poems to lyrical odes to rot, growth, and healing; from meditations on Roman portrait busts and the fleshy canvases of Lucian Freud to observations on sash cords, postage stamps, and hand tools; from several brief episodes in family history to a pair of long autobiographical poems, the antic and eclectic "Midpoint," written at age thirty-five, and the elegiac masterpiece "Endpoint," completed just before his death at seventy-six. The variety of the work is astonishing, the craftsmanship always of the highest caliber.Art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, the beauty of the man-made and the God-given worlds--these recurring topics provided Updike ever-surprising occasions for wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century: "No other writer of his time captured so much of this passing pageant. And that he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant."
Selected Poems
by Amy Clampitt Mary Jo SalterWhen Amy Clampitt's first collection, The Kingfisher, was published, it was hailed as that rare first book that "signals a major poet in full bloom" (Los Angeles Times). Its author was sixty-three years old. Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. Now, the most essential poems from these five volumes are gathered together.Clampitt was an impassioned observer of the natural world, the delights of which color many of these poems: writing of the fog, she described "a stuff so single / it might almost be lifted, / folded over, crawled underneath / or slid between, as nakedness- / caressingsheets." Such was the texture of her language, too. She was a traveler, reporting back from England and Greece, from California and Maine, and from her native Midwest. An Iowa transplant to New York, the descendant of pioneers, she wrote of prairies and subways; of the movements of wildflowers, people, and ideas; and of the widespread modern experience of uprootedness.Here is a treasure of Amy Clampitt's verse, for those who are reading her for the first time, as well as for those who have long admired her.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Selected Poems
by E. E. Cummings Richard S. Kennedy"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."--Randall Jarrell The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published. Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.
Selected Poems: Emily Dickinson Poems Selected By Anne Car (Bcl1-ps American Literature Ser.)
by Emily DickinsonA collection of poems by &“one of America&’s greatest and most original poets of all time&” (Poetry Foundation). One of the nineteenth century&’s leading poets, Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime, though only a handful were published. This collection includes some of Dickinson&’s best-known works, reflecting her thoughts on nature, life, death, the mind, and the spirit. &“Emily Dickinson is one of our most original writers, a force destined to endure in American letters. . . . Without elaborate philosophy, yet with irresistible ways of expression, Emily Dickinson&’s poems have true lyric appeal, because they make abstractions, such as love, hope, loneliness, death, and immortality, seem near and intimate and faithful.&” —The Atlantic &“Emily Dickinson did not leave any poetics or treatise to explain her life&’s work, so we can come to her poetry with minds and hearts open, and unearth whatever it is we need to find. Her oeuvre is a large one and most of her work was done in secret—she didn&’t share most of what she wrote. Ten or so poems were published in her lifetime, mostly without her consent. She often included poems with letters but, after her death, the poet&’s sister Vinnie was surprised to find almost eighteen hundred individual poems in Dickinson&’s bedroom, some of them bound into booklets by the poet.&” —Publishers Weekly &“Dickinson found love, spiritual quickening and immortality, all on her own terms.&” —The Guardian
Selected Poems: Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)
by John DonneConsidered by many critics the foremost English "metaphysical" poet, John Donne (1572–1631) earned renown for both sacred and secular verse, his love poems in the latter genre ranking among his most original and popular works. Brilliant and wide-ranging, Donne's verse is distinguished by its passion, insight, and inspired use of striking metaphors or "conceits." This volume contains a rich selection of the poet's best work, including, from the Songs and Sonnets: "The Good Morrow," "The Canonization," "The Relic," and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"; from the Elegies: "On His Mistress" and "To His Mistress Going to Bed"; a selection from the Holy Sonnets (including "Death Be Not Proud"); "Good Friday. 1613. Riding Westward," "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" and many more.
Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)
by John DrydenThe leading English literary figure of the latter half of the 17th century, John Dryden (1631-1700) wrote dramas and critical works, but his reputation stands on his mastery of verse, in particular the heroic couplet. Encompassing political, religious, philosophic, and artistic issues, Dryden's poetry offers rich evidence of his social consciousness. "Annus Mirabilis," a celebration of the tumultuous events of 1666, casts the catastrophic effects of war, plague, and London's Great Fire as a providential gesture, from which the nation would arise, phoenix-like, to greater heights. Other selections in this volume include his great satires "Absalom and Achitophel" and "Mac Flecknoe," along with "Song from Marriage à la Mode," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," "Epigram on Milton," and "Alexander's Feast." Dover original selection of poems from standard texts. New Publisher's Note.
Selected Poems
by John DrydenA new and comprehensive selection of Dryden's poetry, revealing him as a master of theatricality, ventriloquism, and unmistakable originality. Brought together here are many of the poems from his time as Poet Laureate and loyal servant of the crown, including the Biblical allegory 'Absalom and Achitophel', in which the poet attacked those who intrigued against the King and earned himself a reputation for menace and a number of powerful enemies. His 'Works of Virgil' set the standard for the translation of Latin poetry. His last work, 'Fables Ancient and Modern' combined original verse and new translations, showing how he transformed the idioms and gestures of other voices and made them his own.
Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Black History)
by Paul Laurence DunbarDubbed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro race" by Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) is best known for his lively dialect poems. In addition to his dialect verse, however, Dunbar also wrote fine poems in standard English that captured many elements of the black experience in America.This volume contains a representative cross-section of both types of verse, including "Ode to Ethiopia," "Worn Out," "Not They Who Soar," "When Malindy Sings," "We Wear the Mask," "Little Brown Baby," "Dinah Kneading Dough," "The Haunted Oak," "Black Samson of Brandywine" and many more.A rich amalgam of lyrics encompassing patriotism, a celebration of rural life and homey pleasures, anger at the inequalities accorded his race, and faith in ultimate justice, this collection affords readers an excellent opportunity to enjoy the distinctive voice and poetic technique of one of the most beloved and widely read African-American poets.
Selected Poems
by Paul Laurence Dunbar Herbert MartinPaul Laurence Dunbar was "the most promising young colored man" in nineteenth-century America, according to Frederick Douglass, and subsequently one of the most controversial. His plantation lyrics, written while he was an elevator boy in Ohio, established Dunbar as the premier writer of dialect poetry and garnered him international recognition. More than a vernacular lyricist, Dunbar was also a master of classical poetic forms, who helped demonstrate to post-Civil War America that literary genius did not reside solely in artists of European descent. William Dean Howells called Dunbar's dialect poems "evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all."
Selected Poems
by Mona Van DuynThis generous selection of Mona Van Duyn’s distinguished, award-winning work spans four decades. Beginning with her classicValentines to the Wide World(1959), encompassing the intimate voice ofBedtime Stories(1972) and the movingLetters from a Father(1982), crowned by the life-spanningFirefall(1993),Selected Poemsreacquaints us with a poet whose ear is keenly tuned to the music of nature and human conversation. In lively and varied forms, from her minimalist sonnets to her magisterial longer pieces, Van Duyn captures a multiplicity of worlds within her world, in a tone inflected by both Midwestern pragmatism and a deep metaphysical intelligence. As she contemplates the act of reading in bed, a Rhenish sculpture in the Cloisters, or the loss of her mother, the poet goes beyond context to discover consciousness: an expression of the larger ideas and emotions—finally, the art—in the smallest details of our lives. From the Hardcover edition.
Selected Poems
by T. S. EliotChosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet's most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," "The Waste Land," "The Hollow Men," and "Ash Wednesday"--as well as many other fine selections from Eliot's early work.
Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Thomas HardyWidely known as the author of such classic novels as The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was also a great poet. His lyricism, subtlety, depth, and variety have earned him a significant place in the ranks of modern English poets.This modestly priced volume contains seventy of Hardy's finest poems, including "The Darkling Thrush," "Hap," "The Ruined Maid," "The Convergence of the Twain," "I Look Into My Glass," "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" and many others. These remarkable poems offer ample evidence of Hardy's intense perception and his peculiar power to express deep emotion. They also reflect his distinctive style, which fuses a reliance on traditional stanza formats and rhyme with a unique diction and imaginative power.
Selected Poems
by Thomas HardyA generous selection of poems by a major Victorian writer, a virtuoso of traditional forms who came to be recognized as a uniquely inventive and original voice in modern poetry This selection of poems by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), edited by David Bromwich, covers the range of Hardy’s extraordinary work: songs, ballads, and sonnets, dramatic monologues and elegies, along with poems that mark epochal events, such as the end of the Great War. This selection shows why Hardy has been admired as the most inward and personal of the moderns, yet also the most accessible and widely read. Included here is the full and integral text of Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy, the final selection of his own work that Hardy chose to publish. Bromwich has selected more than one hundred fifty additional poems that cover the length of Hardy’s career, from Wessex Poems to Winter Words. His critical and biographical introduction sets Hardy’s achievement in the context of a career in prose and poetry that has no parallel.
Selected Poems
by Tony HarrisonA revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected Poems This indispensable new selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes over sixty poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem 'v.', a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard which caused enormous controversy when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and is now regarded as one of the key poems of the late twentieth century.This substantially revised and updated edition now also features a generous selection of Harrison's most recent work, including the acclaimed poems he wrote for the Guardian on the Gulf War and then from the front line in the Bosnian War which won him the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2007.Selected Poems is a collection to be savoured by fans of Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Sophie Hannah.'A voracious appetite for language. Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably tender' Harold Pinter'In the front rank of contemporary British poets. Harrison's range is exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp pleasure' Melvyn Bragg'The poem "v." is the most outstanding social poem of the last twenty-five years. Seldom has a British poem of such personal intensity had such universal range' Martin Booth'Poems written in a style which I feel I have all my life been waiting for' Stephen Spender'A poet of great technical accomplishment whose work insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence' Sean O'Brien, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Selected Poems
by Anthony HechtAlongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume--the first selected poems to be made from Hecht's seven individual volumes--will be captivated by Hecht's dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are "moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies."This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come.Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,God's finger in the cloud, and on the groundNothing but springtime, nothing else at all.But in our fallen state where the blood huntsFor blood, and rises at the hunting sound,What do we know of lasting since the fall?Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth,Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree,The grasshopper, and the failing of desire,And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecyOf the six-pointed starlight, and might choirA secret-voweled, unutterable truth?--from "A Poem for Julia"From the Trade Paperback edition.