Tulips & Chimneys


E.E. Cummings - 1923
    Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love.

Works of William Blake


William Blake - 1953
    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

Paris Spleen


Charles Baudelaire - 1869
    Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age—and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.

Selected Writings


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1950
     This new edition offers a broad view of the author's finest work, featuring his critical essays, poems, and letters, plus a considerable amount of material from the Journals, including an entry discovered in 1964 in the Library of Congress.

The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas


Mahatma Gandhi - 1962
    Gandhi, called Mahatma (“great soul”), was the father of modern India, but his influence has spread well beyond the subcontinent, and is as important today as it was in the first part of the twentieth century, and during this nation’s own civil rights movement. Taken from Gandhi’s writings throughout his life. The Essential Gandhi introduces us to his thoughts on politics, spirituality, poverty, suffering, love, non-violence, civil disobedience, and his own life. The pieces collected here, with explanatory head-notes by Gandhi biographer Louis Fischer, offer the clearest, most thorough portrait of one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known.“Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable... We may ignore him at our own risk.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.With a new Preface drawn from the writings of Eknath EaswaranIn the annals of spirituality certain books stand out both for their historical importance and for their continued relevance. The Vintage Spiritual Classics series offers the greatest of these works in authoritative new editions, with specially commissioned essays by noted contemporary commentators. Filled with eloquence and fresh insight, encouragement and solace, Vintage Spiritual Classics are incomparable resources for all readers, who seek a more substantive understanding of mankind's relation to the divine.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism


Oscar Wilde - 1891
    Wilde argues that under capitalism the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism-are forced, indeed, so to spoil them: instead of realizing their true talents, they waste their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus, caring people seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it because, the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

Sophie's World


Jostein Gaarder - 1991
    Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Immortality


Milan Kundera - 1990
    It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ

Collected Poems


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1956
    Compiled by her sister after the poet's death and originally published in 1956, this is the definitive edition of Millay, right up through her last poem, Mine the Harvest.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces


Joseph Campbell - 1949
    Examining heroic myths in the light of modern psychology, it considers not only the patterns and stages of mythology but also its relevance to our lives today--and to the life of any person seeking a fully realized existence.Myth, according to Campbell, is the projection of a culture's dreams onto a large screen; Campbell's book, like Star Wars, the film it helped inspire, is an exploration of the big-picture moments from the stage that is our world. It is a must-have resource for both experienced students of mythology and the explorer just beginning to approach myth as a source of knowledge.

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova


Anna Akhmatova - 1965
    Martin's Press, 1994). Encyclopedic in scope, with more than 800 poems, 100 photographs, a historical chronology, index of first lines, and a bibliography. The Complete Poems will be the definitive English language collection of Akhmatova for many years to come.

The Lives of the Artists


Giorgio Vasari
    Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Portable Beat Reader


Ann Charters - 1992
    Featuring: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure, and more.

Travels in Hyperreality


Umberto Eco - 1973
    His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Early Poems


W.B. Yeats - 1993
    Mythic themes as well as many other topics are masterfully explored in this rich selection of 134 lyrics chiefly selected from six volumes of verse published between 1889 and 1914. Among the poems included are "The Stolen Child" and "Down by the Salley Gardens" (Crossways, 1889); "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," and "To Ireland in the Coming Times" (The Rose, 1893); "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and "A Poet to His Beloved" (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899); "The Song of Red Hanrahan" (In the Seven Woods, 1903); "No Second Troy" and "The Fascination of What's Difficult" (The Green Helmet and Other Poems, 1910); "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" and "To a Shade" (Responsibilities, 1914); and many more. This representative selection offers readers a splendid sampling of the distinctive Yeatsian voice — romantic, yearning, full of the magic and mysticism Yeats imbibed as a boy in the West of Ireland, later counterbalanced by an anguished realism grounded in the poet's nationalistic and political sympathies.