On entering the Society of Jesus at the age of 24, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors.' The poems, letters, and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life and published posthumously in 1918.His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice. Intense, vital, and individual, his writing is the 'terrible crystal' through which the soul--the inscape, the nature of things--may be illuminated.

    List of Works by TitleList of Works in Alphabetical OrderList of Works in Chronological OrderWilliam Blake Biography * America: A Prophecy * Auguries of Innocence * The Book of Thel * Eternity * Europe: A Prophecy * The Gates of Paradise * I Heard an Angel * I saw a chapel all of gold * An Island in the Moon * The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: o The Argument o The Voice of the Devil o A Memorable Fancy o Proverbs of Hell o A Memorable Fancy 1 o A Memorable Fancy 2 o A Memorable Fancy 3 o A Song of Liberty * Milton * Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau * Poetical Sketches: o Song: How sweet I roam'd from field to field o To Autumn o To the Evening Star o To Morning o To Spring o To Summer o To Winter * Silent, Silent Night * The Smile * Songs of Innocence and Experience: * Song of Innocense: o The Shepherd o The Echoing Green o The Lamb o The Little Black Boy o The Blossom o The Chimney-sweeper o The Little Boy Lost o The Little Boy Found o Laughing Song o A Cradle Song o The Divine Image o Holy Thursday o Night o Spring o Nurse's Song o Infant Joy o A Dream o On Another's Sorrow * Songs of Experience: o Earth's Answer o The Clod And The Pebble o Holy Thursday o The Little Girl Lost o The Little Girl Found o The Chimney-Sweeper o Nurse's Song o The Sick Rose o The Fly o The Angel o The Tiger o My Pretty Rose Tree o Ah, Sunflower o The Lily o The Garden Of Love o The Little Vagabond o London o The Human Abstract o Infant Sorrow o A Poison tree o A Little Boy Lost o A Little Girl Lost o A Divine Image o A Cradle Song o The Schoolboy o To Tirzah o The Voice Of The Ancient Bard * Tiriel * To the Accuser Who Is the God of This World * To Nobodaddy * Visions of the Daughters of Albion

    As 1990 Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz makes clear in his book-length study, Hieroglyphs of Desire (translated by Esther Allen), Villaurrutia is a major poet of desire whose beloved is the death we live each day. His poems define life between the nocturnal and diurnal and have taken on added poignancy as uncanny prophecies of individual lives in the age of the AIDS epidemic.

    i & my parents2. i & their son3. i & selfdiscovery4. i & you & is5. i & now & him6. i & am & santa clausThese talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e.e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e.e. cummings.

    The reader is exhilarated, led on to agree with Mr. Jarrell joyfully, even to cap his opinions--and at last to grow reckless. . . . Poetry and the Age is enormously readable."-- Louis Simpson, The American Scholar"The most powerful reviewer of poetry active in this country for the last decade. . . . Everybody interested in modern poetry ought to be grateful to him." -- John Berryman, New RepublicRandall Jarrell was the critic whose taste defined American poetry after World War II. Poetry and the Age, his first collection of criticism, was published in 1953. It has been in and out of print over the past 40 years and has become a classic of American letters. In this new edition, two long-lost lectures by Jarrell have been added. Recently discovered by critics, they speak to issues at the heart of Jarrell’s criticism: the structure of poetry and the question "Is American poetry American?"One of the outstanding poets of the postwar generation, Jarrell was also celebrated for his extraordinary praise of some underappreciated older and younger poets and for his witty dismissals of current favorites he thought less qualified. Poetry and the Age includes groundbreaking considerations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost as well as profound appraisals of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, and William Carlos Williams. His early reviews that established the reputations of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are here, beside other enthusiastic discoveries that have withstood the test of time.Poetry and the Age also contains Jarrell’s influential essays on the obscurity of poetry and on the age of criticism, essays that offer some of the most relevant and readable literary judgments of the 20th century.Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) wrote eight books of poetry, five anthologies, four children’s books illustrated by Maurice Sendak, four translations, including Faust: Part I and The Three Sisters (performed on Broadway by the Actor’s Studio), and a novel, Pictures from an Institution. He received the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, served as poet laureate at the Library of Congress in 1957 and 1958, and taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He was a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters.

    

    Translated from the Swedish by Anthony Barnett. P"r Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was one of Sweden's greatest, most prolific, twentieth-century novelists and short story writers. EVENING LAND is the first complete translation of Lagerkvist's ninth and final volume of poetry, the deceptively simple Aftonland (1953). An intensely private man who refused to court publicity, the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951. Barnett's translation (his translation of Robert Giroux's BLANK from the French is also available at SPD) sets straight an earlier, unfinished and otherwise compromised version by W. H. Auden and Leif Sj"berg. "All things exist, only I exist no more, / everything remains, the fragrance of rain in the grass/ as I remember it and the sough of the wind through the trees, / the flight of clouds and the human heart's disquiet.// Only my heart's disquiet no longer exists"-(from "The Dead")

    This selection, chosen from the award-winning Oxford Authors critical edition, includes most of the larger fragments and all of his major English poems, such as The Blessed Virgin, No Worst, The Windhover, Pied Beauty and The Wreck of the Deutschland. The poems are illuminated further by extensive Notes and a useful Introduction to Hopkins's life and poetry.

    In a time when feminism was in its nascent stage, and explicit sexuality was taboo, Mansour's violent eroticism, and poetic mastery were shocking. In "Screams" Mansour breaks open the female wound--and women's rage, ecstacy, and pain came forth in sharp piercing cries. Until now, American readers have not had access to this powerful erotic text. Translated by Serge Gavronsky, "Screams" is a must for anyone interested in the feminist dimension of the Surrealist movement.

    It is, Warren wrote, "in some important senses, a new work." Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. "R.P.W." is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.