Frost: Poems

Author	Rudyard Kipling
ISBN	0307267113

Beloved for his fanciful and engrossing children’s literature, controversial for his enthusiasm for British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most widely read writers of Victorian and modern English literature. In addition to writing more than two dozen works of fiction, including...

Author	Alfred Tennyson
ISBN	1400041872

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a more complex writer than his status as Queen Victoria’s favorite poet might suggest. Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries....

Author	W.H. Auden
ISBN	0679443673

The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Auden is just another reminder of his exhilarating lyric power and his understanding of love and longing in all their sacred and profane guises. One...

Author	Peter Washington
ISBN	0679429069

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal...

Author

D.A. Powell

The first poetry collection by D. A. Powell since his remarkable trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and
Cocktails, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness
that easily falls among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind
—from...

Author	Percy Bysshe Shelley
ISBN	0679429093

Imagine this scene: Somewhere in the awesome surroundings of the French Alps, incessant summer rains covering the valleys with a moist, foggy veil. Inside a cottage, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, are discussing life, principle and the mysterious fears of human nature, which...

Author	John Keats
ISBN	0679433198

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
As a dedicated book reviewer, it is my job to say why I like certain books and dislike others. When it comes to nonfiction, this is reasonably straightforward: if the exposition is clear, if the arguments are logical, if the ideas are reasonable—then it is a worthy...

Author	Harold Schechter
ISBN	0307700933

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.

The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The...

Author	Elizabeth Schmidt
ISBN	0375415041

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0375401857

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece...

Author

William Wordsworth

Of all the lasting innovations that William Wordsworth (1770-1850) brought to our literature, it is his discovery of nature and his fresh vision of human lives in the context of nature that have most influenced our cultural climate. Here, collected in this volume, are Wordsworth’s finest works,...

Author	Alexander Pushkin
ISBN	0375406727

Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...

Author	Edgar Allan Poe
ISBN	0679445056

Poe wrote few poems, few of which are any good. His technical expertise is excellent but nearly all of his poems lack substance; they are like brass clockworks, shiny, complex, dazzling to look at, difficult to craft, but ultimately lifeless. I suspect Poe knew this too and that he was simply attempting...

Author

Rainer Maria Rilke

I fell in love with Rilke's poetry from quotes I found here and there. Now, after reading this collection, I fell in love with him fully and completely. Even though I wasn't really interested in all the subjects he talks about in his poems, I still found verses that touched me deeply - and I found that, taken...

Author	Anna Akhmatova
ISBN	0307264246

A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova—denounced by the Soviet regime for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference”—is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Before the revolution, Akhmatova...

Author	Langston Hughes
ISBN	0375405518

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a...

Author	Gerard Manley Hopkins
ISBN	0679444696

The poet feels nature, life, so deeply he is overwhelmed. He sometimes invents words and grammar to express his ecstasy. I just love Hopkins for this, for his passion.

Two of my favorite poems:


Pied Beauty

Glory be to G-d for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour...

Author	J.D. McClatchy
ISBN	0375413294

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind’s nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea–pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis–have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities...

Author	Samuel Taylor Coleridge
ISBN	0393979040

Review title: Coleridge through a keyhole

I had any prose by Coleridge on my Christmas wish list so my daughter the English PhD gave me this 775 page selection from his poetry and prose, and lest you think this is anything close to complete you don't know Coleridge. Here is one quick data point...

Author	Sylvia Plath
ISBN	0375404643

I'm not sure if I'm being morbid but it is almost impossible for me to read any of Sylvia Plath's work without thinking about her suicide. I guess it's because her poetry is already so dark, and knowing that she suffered from depression and ended her own life, adds another element to it.

With that...

Author	John Hollander
ISBN	0679436316

An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming...