Selected Poetry

Author	Novalis
ISBN	0914232908

This bilingual, revised, third edition of Dick Higgins' popular translation presents the complete Athenaum version of Frederich von Hardenburgh's classic romantic long poem, and the substantially different manuscript version of the first section. The German text is en face. The six hymns comprise...

Author	Friedrich Hölderlin
ISBN	0140424164

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe’s supreme poets. He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology...

Author	Friedrich Schiller
ISBN	0898751772

Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) was a leading German poet, and a philosopher of freedom. Schiller's work exemplifies the highest standards of ethics and the ideal of the truly educated, multilingual citizen of the world. Schiller devoted himself not only to self-determination and freedom but...

Author	D.H. Lawrence
ISBN	1853264172

With an Introduction and Notes by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected...

Author	E.T.A. Hoffmann
ISBN	0140443924

This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Suspense dominates tales such as "Mademoiselle de Scudery", in which an apprentice...

Author	Theocritus
ISBN	0192839845

A key figure in the development of Western literature, the Greek poet Theocritus of Syracuse, was the inventor of "bucolic" or pastoral poetry in the first half of the third century BC. These vignettes of country life, which center on competitions of song and love are the foundational poems of the western...

Author

Rainer Maria Rilke

I would like to step out of my heart’s door
and be under the great sky.
— Rilke, “Lament”
A myriad of shades, a plethora of images, the juxtaposition of sentiments which soothe and unsettle. A miscellany of visuals and existential hues. A mélange of nuances and distinctive sounds....

Author	Czesław Miłosz
ISBN	0060188677

Selected Poems: 1931-2004 celebrates Czeslaw Milosz's lifetime of poetry. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of expression and probing inquiry. Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz at a crossroads of civilizations in northeastern Europe. This was less a melting...

Author	Charles Baudelaire
ISBN	0140446249

The 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...

Author	Eugenio Montale
ISBN	0374526257

Winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Premio Montale, an acclaimed translation of Italy's greatest modern poet

Eugenio Montale is universally recognized as having brought the great Italian lyric tradition that begins with Dante into the twentieth century with unrivaled...

Author	John Dryden
ISBN	0192840770

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the leading writer of his day and a major cultural spokesman following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. His work includes political poems, satire, religious apologias, translations, critical essays and plays. This authoritative edition brings together a unique...

Author	Christopher Marlowe
ISBN	0143104950

The poetry gets five stars, but the edition only gets two. With modernized spelling but no notes or context, Marlowe's translations of Ovid's Elegies and of Lucan's First Book are especially difficult to understand. This slim, inexpensive book (Dover Thrift Editions) might be useful if you already...

Author

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope has often been termed the first true professional poet in English, whose dealings with the book trade helped to produce the literary marketplace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this representative selection of Pope's most important work, the texts are presented in chronological...

Author	Ben Jonson
ISBN	0140422773

One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The Complete Poems contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published...

Author	François Villon
ISBN	0874512360

Can't believe I haven't rated this one yet... Villon is Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Poe and Genet a half-millennium before those beloved brethren in sin. Villon is the bloodied words of God writ on the Satanic chasuble. Villon is the banished poet-murderer-thief haunting the interstices of a dead-lily...

Author	Paul Verlaine
ISBN	0520012984

Like a loud flight of birds, dark complexity,
All my memories beating down on me,
Beating down through the yellow foliage
Of my heart’s bent alder-trunk, its gaze
Silvered violet in the lake of Regret,
Whose melancholy is still flowing yet,
Beat down, and then the evil murmur
That...

Author

John Clare

Clare's highly personal evocations of landscape and place are some of the most poignant lyrics in English poetry. His celebration of all forms of natural life and his laments for the death of rural England grew directly out of his intimate knowledge of the labourer's life, the wheatfields and hedgerows...

Author	Jorge Luis Borges
ISBN	0143106015

 

This landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of Jorge Luis Borges. More intimate and personally revealing than his fiction, and more classical in form than the inventive metafictions that are his hallmark, the sonnets reflect Borges in...

Author	Algernon Charles Swinburne
ISBN	1853264431

I think there is a reason why I never read more Swinburne poetry than I did while in college and getting my Master’s. It’s not the poetry is bad. It isn’t, but if you compare it to the Brownings, to Donne, to Marlowe, to Chaucer, and so on, it doesn’t quite match them.
Well, most of his poetry...

Author	Derek Walcott
ISBN	0374125619

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott’s celebrated, inimitable, essential career

“He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.” To Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise, one might add the more concrete honors that...

Author	Guillaume Apollinaire
ISBN	0520242122

A fully annotated, bilingual edition, Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire's own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless,...