Book picks similar to
Collected Poems 1975 by Robert Graves


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20th-century

Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose


Wallace Stevens - 1957
    It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.

The Bell


Iris Murdoch - 1958
    A new bell, legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. Dora Greenfield, erring wife, returns to her husband. Michael Mead, leader of the community, is confronted by Nick Fawley, with whom he had disastrous homosexual relations, while the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean....Iris Murdoch's funny and sad novel has themes of religion, the fight between good and evil, and the terrible accidents of human frailty.

Selected Poems


Paul Éluard - 1950
    This bilingual edition contains a representative selection of poems from different periods and different aspects of his vast output.

The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting


Rumi - 1999
    The Glance taps a major, yet little explored theme in Rumi's poetry-the mystical experience that occurs in the meeting of the eyes of the lover and the beloved, parent and child, friend and soul mate.Coleman Barks's new translations of these powerful and complex poems capture Rumi's range from the ethereal to the everyday. They reveal the unique place of human desire, love, and ecstasy, where there exists not just the union of two souls, but the crux of the universe.Here is a new kind of love lyric for our time-one of longing, connection, and wholeness.

Selected Poetry


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1954
    This is to be the first verse translation of Goethe's poetry in penguin classics and replaces Luke's own 1964 prose translation which has been in print continously since then (life sales 43,000).

A Little Woman


Franz Kafka - 1924
    It was first published in the Easter supplement of Prager Tagblatt on 20 April 1924. During his final illness Kafka corrected the proofs of the story for the inclusion into collection A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler) published by Verlag Die Schmiede after his death.

The Immortal Bartfuss


Aharon Appelfeld - 1983
    Using the techniques of omission and indirection perfected in such masterpieces as Badenheim 1939 and To the Land of the Cattails, Appelfeld tells the story of Bartfuss, enigmatically "the immortal" because of his experience in the camps. Now locked in a hopeless marriage, Bartfuss struggles to suppress the emotions and recollections he fears and despises, while trying to keep alive the poise, dignity, and compassion essential to a human being. The Immortal Bartfuss is an overwhelming and unforgettable study of a man reduced to his tragic limits.

The Complete Poems


Hart Crane - 1938
    Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction.

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel


Nikos Kazantzakis - 1938
    Following an encounter with the former Helen of Troy (now returned to her husband, the king of Sparta, after the ignominious defeat of the Trojans), Odysseus gradually wends his way to Egypt and southward, grappling all the while with questions about the nature of God. Considered by Kazantzakis himself to be one of his most important works, The Odyssey takes readers on a richly imagined quest for adventure and understanding with one of literature’s most timeless characters.

The War Poems


Siegfried Sassoon - 1919
    Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered here and chronologically ordered, thereby tracing the course of the war, are an extraordinary testimony to the almost unimaginable experiences of a combatant in that bitter conflict. Moving from the patriotic optimism of the first few poems (" ... fighting for our freedom, we are free") to the anguish and anger of the later work (where "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists / Flounders in mud ... "), there comes a point when the reality of trench-warfare and its aftershocks move beyond comprehension: Sassoon knows this, and it becomes a powerful element in his art. As a book, the images have a cumulative relentlessness that make it almost impossible to read more than a few poems in one sitting. Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

The Invention of Love


Tom Stoppard - 1997
    E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the elder Housman confronts the younger version of himself and his memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson -- the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings.

Selected Poems


Constantinos P. Cavafy - 1972
    P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria's ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as 'Anna Comnena' and 'You did not understand', while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in 'Ides of March', 'The God Abandoning Antony' and 'Nero's Deadline'. And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in 'One Night', 'I have gazed so much' and 'The Café Entrance', and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in 'An Old Man' and 'Of the Shop'. Winner of the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 2009.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Stories of Three Decades


Thomas Mann - 1936
    24 short stories including Little Herr Friedemann, Death in Venice, Mario and the Magician, The Blood of the Walsungs, and A Man and His Dog.

Sartor Resartus


Thomas Carlyle - 1834
    This is the first edition to present the novel as it originally appeared, with indications of the changes Carlyle made to later editions.

Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off & Dracula


Liz Lochhead - 1987
    Written in Lallan Scots, it is a most exciting piece of poetic drama.