E. Cummings's biographer, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.The selection includes most of the favorites plus many fresh and surprising examples of Cummings's several poetic styles. The corrected texts established by George J. Firmage have been used throughout.

    In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

    Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler—albeit a dazzling one—of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation. Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past — Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined, and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."

    It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight formal structure, and brilliantly effective imagery. But she makes her singular claim on our attention by the fact that she has important things to tell us and tells them dramatically.

    Contains amongst others: John Milton, Thomas Carew, Sir William Davenant, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Southwell, John Donne and Richard Crashaw.

    Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975) in an authoritative version.

    This selection, made by Cummings himself in 1960, offers a comprehensive introduction to his most characteristic work — whether love poems, satirical squibs or nature poetry — and represents the range of his experiments with lyric form, syntax and typography, which combined to offer a radically individual and spontaneous view of the world.

    Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

    "Structures of Rime" affirms his belief in the universal integrity of the poem itself in the living process of language. Thus in "The Structure of Rime I" he declares: "O Lasting Sentence, / sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be."

    As one of the first counter-cultural collections of American verse, this volume fits in Robert Lowell's famous definition of the raw in American poetry. Many of the contributors once derided in the mainstream press of the period are now part of the postmodern canon: Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Guest, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, O'Hara, Snyder, Schuyler, and others. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry delivered the first taste of these remarkable poets, and the book has since become an invaluable historical and cultural record, now available again for a new generation of readers.

    Another is that ancient pre-occupation of poets––the sense of the immediacy of death. Like Villon or Dylan Thomas, Corso lives close to the mystery of death. It is, perhaps, his central theme, on which variations ranging from the terrible to the comic are sounded. But Corso is seldom macabre. A bursting vitality always carries him back to the sensations of the living, though always it is the reality behind the obvious which has caught his eye. “How I love to probe life,” Corso has written, “That’s what poetry is to me, a wondrous prober… It’s not the metre or measure of a line, a breath; not ‘law’ music; but the assembly of great eye sounds placed into an inspired measured idea.”

    The three sequences in the book—"Logging," "Hunting," "Burning"—show the remarkable cohesiveness in Snyder's writings over the years, for we find the poet absorbed, then as now, with Buddhist and Amerindian lore and other interconnections East and West, but above all with the premedical devotion to the land and work.

    G. BelliGiosué CarducciGiovanni PascoliGabriele d´AnnunzioGuido GozzanoDino CampanaUmberto SabaGiuseppe UngarettiEugenio MontaleSalvatore QuasimodoAPPENDIXPoem by A. BlokA note on the prosodiesA note on the pronunciationsNotes on contributors

    

    

    The poem consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". It is recorded only at folios 81 verso - 83 recto of the tenth-century Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It has most often, though not always, been categorised as an elegy, a poetic genre commonly assigned to a particular group of Old English poems that reflect on spiritual and earthly melancholy.

    You will find Chaucer, the storyteller, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the glowing beauty of Keats and Shelley, the complete "Rubaiyat," "The Rime of Ancient Mariner," the homespun strength of Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, the bitter but precise phrases of T.S. Elliot, the fiery imagery of Dylan Thomas. This anthology is more than a rich and abundant selection of verse. It is a unique guide to the whole development of poet in the English language. Interwoven throughout the book are hundreds of exciting stories of the lives and times of the poets, and revealing interpretations of their imperishable works.More from the front cover: "English and American - 437 poems by 121 poets

    “[Sandburg’s poetry] is independent, honest, direct, lyric, and it endures, clamorous and muted, magical as life itself” (New York Times). Introduction by Mark Van Doren.

    

    Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the language school, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning." The Distances is his second collection of Poems.

    This is a volume that every lover of poetry and all who are interested in the American literacy scene will want to add to their libraries.Here, for the first time, is the full and moving story of Vachel Lindsay's love for Sara Teasdale, revealed in excerpts, never before published, from his tender and compelling letters to her.Here, too, are details of her association with other well-known personalities in the poetry world who played their parts in her life, among them John Hall Wheelcock, Orrick Johns, Harriet Monroe, Eunice Tietjens, Jessie Rittenhouse, William Marion Reedy, John Myers O'Hara, and Witter Bynner.Included in the important source materials are a fascinating picture of the "Potters," the group of artistic young girls to which Sara Teasdale belonged in her youth in St. Louis--a group that did much to give outlet to her developing talent; excerpts from her diary that she kept on her first youthfully enthusiastic trip abroad; and quotations from the unpublished biography of Christina Rossetti that Miss Teasdale was writing at the time of her death.Miss Carpenter's biography of Sara Teasdale traces the story of the poet's growth from her childhood in St. Louis at the turn of the century through her youth, her early nation-wide recognition as an outstanding poet, her marriage to Ernst Filsinger and her years in New York, and, finally, her tragic death at forty-eight.The author has worked closely with relatives and friends of Miss Teasdale, and with her editor and associates in the literary world, to put together a perceptive interpretation not only of the poet and her work, but of the woman whose sensitivity and reticence led one close friend to call her "the delectable enigma."

    Kennedy. Oxford University Press, 1960. Fourth Printing version, 1965.