Hughes: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

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	Robert Frost
ISBN	0679455140

From one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not...

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	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	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	Claude McKay
ISBN	0486408760

In his 1918 autobiographical essay, "A Negro Poet Writes," Claude McKay (1889–1948), reveals much about the wellspring of his poetry.
"I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest,...

Author	W.E.B. Du Bois
ISBN	0380015811

UP FROM SLAVERY

The autobiography of Booker T Washington is a startling portrait ofone of the great Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The illegitimate son of 'a white man and a Negro slave, Washington, a man who struggled for his education, would go on to struggle...

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	Carmela Ciuraru
ISBN	0375413324

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave...

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	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...

Author	David Levering Lewis
ISBN	0140263349

The decade and a half that followed World War I was a time of tremendous optimism in Harlem. It was a time when Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, and countless others made their indelible mark on the landscape of American culture: African Americans made their...

Author

E.E. Cummings

First published in 1931, ViVa contains four of E. E. Cummings' most experimental poems as well as some of his most memorable. The volume includes such no-famous celebrations as "i sing of Olaf glad and big" and "if there are any heavens my mother will (all be herself) have," along with such favorites as...

Author

Rickey Laurentiis

In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal...

Author	Andrea Barnet
ISBN	1565123816

The ladies were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. Poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses, they were thinkers and drinkers. They eschewed the...