The best-known works of more than 60 British and American poets, written over a period of nearly 400 years, comprise this superb collection of verse. Focusing on poems of faith — inspiring, comforting, and profound works with religious themes and ideals — the volume includes «Holy Sonnets» by John Donne, Ben Jonson's «To the Holy Trinity,» «Paradise» by George Herbert, «On His Blindness» by John Milton, as well as poems by Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Edward Taylor,...
Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style—its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.
Among the best known and most quoted books of the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms contains some 150 hymns of praise, prayers of crisis, and songs of faith once attributed solely to the Biblical King David. It is now believed that this collection of poems, originally chanted or sung with instrumental accompaniment, reflects Israel's entire history from the period of the exodus (13th century B.C.) to the postexilic restoration (after 600 B.C.), and we cherish them as the expressions of...
One of the most successful poets in America and a fascinating literary figure of the early twentieth century, Edna St. Vincent Millay found her voice in a national poetry contest at the age of twenty. Her poems received critical praise and became the first step toward receiving the Pulitzer Award years later. An acclaimed poet of the Jazz Age, this liberated, often rebellious, woman enchanted us with her beautiful sonnets and lyrics, even as she surprised us with her unconventional personal...
"A terrible beauty is born," observed the greatest modern Irish poet after his country's 1916 Easter Rebellion against the British. This streak of proud nationalism, interwoven with elements of Celtic lore and mysticism, and infused with a hard-earned wisdom, makes Yeats's works resonate to this day. His career spanned five decades, earning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and he is widely regarded as the finest English-language poet of the twentieth century.This volume...
Encompassing a broad range of subjects, styles, and moods, English poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is generally classified under the term «Romantic,» suggesting an emphasis on imagination and individual experience, as well as a preoccupation with such theme as nature, death, and the supernatural.This volume contains a rich selection of poems by England's six greatest poets: William Blake (24 poems, including «The Tyger» and «Auguries of Innocence»), William...
Considered the greatest Roman poet, Vergil spent over a decade working on this monumental epic poem, which has been a source of literary inspiration and poetic grandeur for more than 2,000 years. Its twelve books tell the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found a new city in the west. This city, Lavinium, was the parent city of Rome.Drawn by divine destiny after the fall of Troy, Aeneas sailed westward toward the land of the Tiber. After many adventures,...
<P>These new poems by the author of Saint Judas and The Green Wall embody a sharp break with his earlier work. Their impact is well described by the British critic Michael Hamburger: «He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and other continental poets and evolved a medium of his own. This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are &#8216;the objective correlatives' of emotion and feeling. It is only in...