From the opening "Proem" (prologue poem) he offers in this first book-"I am a Negro: / Black as night is black, / Black the depths of my Africa"-Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans, at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As his Knopf editor Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 volume, illuminating the potential of this promising young voice, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race...Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal" and, he concludes, they are "the expression [of] an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, sometimes with shocking confidence and clarity: "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies / That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers/ Of the world."

    The renowned classicist, translator, and critic William Arrowsmith translated all three volumes."Virtually incomparable. . . . Arrowsmith has quite literally distilled this poetry's essence in order to recompose it with all of its colors, scents, and exquisitely understated potency intact." — Rebecca West

    - lines 95-98The Hollow Men (1925) is a poem by T. S. Eliot, divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English". It follows the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These "hollow men" are broken, lost souls. They fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfillment. They did not put any good or evil into the world so they cannot move on into the afterlife.

    This book celebrates the beauty of summer and introduces children to the season's flowers by making them magical.

    

    

    The happiness of meeting, the sadness of separation, the agony of longing and waiting, and the perfection of love in absence—Manhae's gift was to give these moments their due in terms both subtle and surprisingly evocative. Long a cultural hero in Korea, Manhae—whose work can be compared to that of Rumi and even Pablo Neruda—finally receives his proper audience in the West.

    4 POEMS, 19091925 P O E MS i 909 - i 92, 5 BY T. S. ELIOT LONDON FABER 6 FABER LIMITED 24 RUSSELL SQUARE TO HENRY WARE ELIOT 1843-1919 CONTENTS PRUFROCK 1917 PAGE The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1 1 Portrait of a Lady 20 Preludes 28 Rhapsody on a Windy Night 32 Morning at the Window 37 The Boston Evening Transcript 38 Aunt Helen 39 Cousin Nancy 40 Mr. Apollinax 41 Hysteria 43 Conversation Galante 44 La Figlia che Piange 45 POEMS 1920 PAGE Gerontion 49 Burbank with a Baedeker Bleistein with a Cigar 54 Sweeney Erect 57 A Cooking Egg 60 Le Directeur 63 Melange adult re de tout 65 Lime de Miel 66 The Hippopotamus 67 Dans le Restaurant 70 Whispers of Immortality 72 Mr. Eliots Sunday Morhing Service 75 Sweeney among the Nightingales 78 THE WASTE LAND 1922 The Wasteland 81 Notes no THE HOLLOW MEN 1925 The Hollow Men 123 PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS 1917 For Jean Verdenal, 18891915 mort aux Dardanelles la quantitate Puote veder del amor che a te mi scalda, Quando dumento nostra vanitate Trattando I ombre come cosa salda. THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK S io ere Jesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mat tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria sen a piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun y s iodo il vero, tema dinfamia ti rispondo. LET us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdusjt restaurants with oyster-shells Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . Oh, do not ask, Whatis it Let us go and make our visit. ii In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening., Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window-panes There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet 12

    Published the same year Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a masters in English, Color was a brilliant debut by a poet who had already gained a reputation as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Deeply personal and attuned to poetic tradition, Cullen’s verses capture the spirit of creative inquiry that defined a generation of writers, musicians, painters, and intellectuals while changing the course of American history itself.“Over three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved, / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?” In “Heritage,” Cullen investigates his relationship with the past as a black man raised in a nation his people were forced to build. His question bears a dual sense of genuine wonder and cynical doubt, and ultimately produces no easy answer. For Cullen could have just as easily asked “What is America to me?”, to which his poem “Incident” might respond: “I saw a Baltimorean / Keep looking straight at me. / […] / And so I smiled, but he poked out / His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’ / […] Of all the things that happened there / That’s all I can remember.” In these lines, a single memory serves to define an entire city; an entire childhood, even, is defined by the violent response of a white man consumed with hatred. Cullen’s relationship to place, whether Africa, America, or Baltimore, is inextricably linked to his experience of racial violence. With this knowledge, he navigates the spaces between these places, inhabiting a language and a poetic tradition thrust upon him at birth. For Cullen, poetry is as much a means of survival and self-invention as it is a form of art―without it, where would he be?