Rilke is unquestionably the most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation, of spiritual quest, that the twentieth century has known. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert a seemingly endless fascination for contemporary readers.In Stephen Mitchell’s versions, many readers feel that they have discovered an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of Rilke’s poetry more accurately and convincingly than has ever been done before.Mr. Mitchell is impeccable in his adherence to Rilke’s text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thoughts; at the same time, his work has authority and power as poetry in its own right. Few translators of any poet have arrived at the delicate balance of fidelity and originality that Mr. Mitchell has brought off with seeming effortlessness.Originally published: New York : Random House, 1982.

    Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

    Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Cesaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupe has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Cesaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text--eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupe. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

    His posthumously published collection of poems under the title Sky, wind, stars, and poems is one of the all-time favorites of Korean readers. Wishing not to have so much as a speck of shame toward heaven until the day I die, I suffered, even when the wind stirred the leaves. (From Foreword) In simple diction and straightforward expressions, his poems sing of his love for his people, his compassion for the poor and destitute, and his hopes for freedom and independence. These themes still resonate deep within the hearts of the Korean people. His imprisonment and eventual death in 1945 in a Japanese prison lend great poignancy to his work.

    

    "You still need a silver penny to get into fairyland."

    

    Reviewing it for Poetry, I commented on one of his remarkable gifts, that of the compassionate flow of self into the things of his experience. His poems become what they love. No other modern poet seems so directly tuned to the natural universe; his disturbance was in being human. The life in his poems emerges out of stones and swamps, tries on leaves and wings, struggles toward the divine. 'Brooding on God,' he wrote near the end, 'I may become a man.' The soul trapped in his ursine frame gathered to itself a host of 'lovely diminutives.' This florist's son never really departed from the moist, fecund world of his father's Saginaw greenhouses, reputed to be the grandest in the state of Michigan."--Stanley Kunitz (Crossroads, Spring 2002)

    

    There are a total of 2,020 poems, falling into the following broad categories, but broken down into even more descriptive groups within the book:I. GodII. JesusIII. ManIV. The Christian LifeV. The Kingdom of GodVI. The Nation and the NationsVII. Death and Immortality

    A collection of some of the most enduring poetry of any age.