Includes many poems used in Arseny's son's films (Andrei Tarkovsky). With a bibliography of both Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky, and illustrations from Tarkovsky's movies.FROM THE INTRODUCTION:Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was was born in June 1907 in Elizavetgrad, later named Kirovograd. He studied at the Academy of Literature in Moscow from 1925 to 1929, and also worked in the editorial office of the journal Gudok. He was well respected as a translator, especially of the Oriental classics, but was little known as a poet for most of his life, being unable to get any of his own work published during the Stalinist era. His poems did not begin to appear in book form until he was over fifty. His son, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, made extensive use of his father's in some of his films, and certain of his diary entries indicate the esteem in which the poet was held in the Soviet Union towards the end of his life. An entry written after Andrei had given a talk at the Moscow Physical Institute in 1980, for instance, reproduces the following note from a member of the audience: 'An enormous number of people in this hall admire Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky as a great Russian poet. Please convey our respects to him.' One of the few recorded public appearances of Arseny Tarkovsky was at the funeral of Anna Akhmatova; he was one of three writers deputed to accompany her coffin from Domodedovo to Leningrad, and he read both at her funeral in Komarovo and at the first evening held in her memory in Moscow. He died in 1989 and is now beginning to be recognised as one of the many significant Russian poets of the twentieth century.From Ignatyevo Forest'The last leaves' embers in total immolationRise into the sky; this whole forestSeethes with irritation, just as we didThat last year we lived together.

    The poetic and cultural tradition forged by the Symbolist poets -- Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Appollinaire, and others -- reverberated throughout the avant garde and counter-cultures of the twentieth century. Modernism, surrealism, abstract impressionism, and the Beat movement are unthinkable without the example of these poets and their theories of art, making this reissue possibly the hippest "dead white European male" anthology ever published.Including translations by Richmond Lattimore, W. S. Merwin, Dudley Fitts, and Richard Wilbur, this anthology has stood the test of time in terms of its selection and scholarly apparatus. Now back in print after twenty years in a fresh new edition, the book features an introduction by Patti Smith that testifies to its epochal impact on her own career, as well as those of other influential latter-day poets, including Lou Reed and Jim Carroll. This rediscovered gem is sure to inspire a new generation.

    Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world. The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

    S. Eliot, Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a definitive biography of this poetic genius. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth century’s most important poet from his childhood in St. Louis to the publication of his revolutionary poem The Waste Land. Crawford’s depiction of Eliot’s childhood—laced with tragedy and shaped by an idealistic, bookish family in which knowledge of saints and martyrs was taken for granted—provides readers with a new understanding of the foundations of some of the most widely read poems in the English language. Meticulously detailed and incisively written, Young Eliot portrays a brilliant, shy, and wounded American who defied his parents’ wishes and committed himself to an artistic life as an immigrant in England, creating work that is astonishing in its scope and vulnerability.     Quoting extensively from Eliot’s poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford shows how the poet’s background in Missouri, Massachusetts, and Paris made him a lightning rod for modernity. Most impressively, Young Eliot reveals the way he accessed his inner life—his anguishes and his fears—and blended them with his omnivorous reading to create his masterpieces "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land. At last, we experience T. S. Eliot in all his tender complexity as student and lover, penitent and provocateur, banker and philosopher—but most of all, Young Eliot shows us as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

    How it works: Ten poets choose a poem of their own and a poem by another poet, who then does the same, and so on unto the fifth generation. Thus D. C. Berman leads to Charles Simic by way of James Tate, and other chains run through Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, Michael Ondaatje, John Ashbery, Mark Doty, C. K. Wright, Dean Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and dozens more.

    These are their words. This is their revolution.

    Selected and introduced by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild and the writer of the celebrated column “Dear Sugar,” this collection is a treasure trove of fine writing and thought-provoking essays.

    The lifetime work of Professor Alexander Schmidt of Königsberg, this book has long been the indispensable companion for every person seriously interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry and prose of any sort, or English literature. It is really two important books in one.Schmidt’s set contains every single word that Shakespeare used, not simply words that have changed their meaning since the seventeenth century, but every word in all the accepted plays and the poems. Covering both quartos and folios, it carefully distinguishes between shades of meaning for each word and provides exact definitions, plus governing phrases and locations, down to the numbered line of the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare. There is no other word dictionary comparable to this work.Even more useful to the general reader, however, is the incredible wealth of exact quotations. Arranged under the words of the quotation itself (hence no need to consult confusing subject classifications) are more than 50,000 exact quotations. Each is precisely located, so that you can easily refer back to the plays or poems themselves, if you wish context.Other features helpful to the scholar are appendixes on basic grammatical observations, a glossary of provincialisms, a list of words and sentences taken from foreign languages, a list of words that form the latter part of word-combinations. This third edition features a supplement with new findings.

    Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

    Nearly 800 masterpieces by 115 American poetics are included in this single volume beginning with Anne Bradstreet. Read the graceful love poetry of Emily Dickinson, the powerful voice of Walt Whitman, the dark musings of Edgar Allan Poe; poems by T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ogden Nash, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Erica Jong, Adrienne Rich, among others. Fully indexed by poet, title, and first line. Sure to bring years of browsing and reading pleasure.

    Responding differently to their common times, Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu crystallize the immense variety of China and the Chinese poetic tradition and, across a distance of twelve hundred years, move the reader as it is rare for even poetry to do.

    Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

    His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings. For thirty-three years, Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing. The Way of the Writer is his record of those years, and the coda to a kaleidoscopic, boundary-shattering career. Organized into six accessible, easy-to-navigate sections, The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process. Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom, starting with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, and delving into the mechanics of scene, dialogue, plot and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer. What separates literature from industrial fiction? What lies at the heart of the creative impulse? How does one navigate the literary world? And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant? Luminous, inspiring, and imminently accessible, The Way of the Writer is a revelatory glimpse into the mind of the writer and an essential guide for anyone with a story to tell.

    His whimsical and often erotic writing has already captured the hearts and minds of literally thousands of readers from around the world. He paints vivid pictures with intricate words and explores the compelling themes of love, loss, relationships and sex. All beautifully captured in poetry, prose, quotes and little short stories.

    Jacobs pursues this challenging task by alternating largely theoretical, theological chapters—drawing above all on Augustine and Mikhail Bakhtin—with interludes that investigate particular readers (some real, some fictional) in the act of reading. Among the authors considered are Shakespeare, Cervantes, Nabakov, Nicholson Baker, George Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Dickens. The theoretical framework is elaborated in the main chapters, while various counterfeits of or substitutes for genuinely charitable interpretation are considered in the interludes, which progressively close in on that rare creature, the loving reader. Through this doubled method of investigation, Jacobs tries to show how difficult it is to read charitably—even should one wish to, which, of course, few of us do. And precisely because the prospect of reading in such a manner is so offputting, one of the covert goals of the book is to make it seem both more plausible and more attractive.