Like Emily Dickinson, she lived in self-imposed isolation, writing of God and lost love with a sensuality and passion that seemed to emanate from the soul.This edition of 53 works combines a number of her best-known sonnets, ballads, and shorter lyrics with her long masterpiece, the narrative fable Goblin Market. A haunting fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market was once labeled a children's poem, yet its intricate symbolism and themes of temptation, sin, and redemption mark it for an adult audience. Among other works included in this choice collection are "The Convent Threshold," "Up-hill," "Cousin Kate," "Winter: My Secret," "Maude Clare," "No, Thank You, John," and "After Death."

    They recount the key episodes in the lives of the gods, and dramatise the moments when they first appear before mortals. Together they offer the most vivid picture we have of the Greek view of the relationship between the divine and human worlds.

    An Introduction and brief biographical notes on the poets are included.

    Published in partnership with The Academy of American Poets.

    Veil contains poems from five of Armantrout's previous books as well as a generous selection of new poems. Her work relies tenaciously on the intelligibility of language, her careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored lines always questioning how linguistic subjects are formed. Armantrout is interested in questions of origin, and the psychology of perception; she is interested in who is speaking and how we know what we know. Fans will welcome the chance to become reacquainted with her witty and lyric meditations on erotic and family issues, and new readers will be captivated by her poems' immediate availability and freshness.

    The most wide-ranging collection of its kind, The Norton Introduction to Poetry offers a complete course in reading and writing about poetry that is designed to appeal to students of all backgrounds, abilities, and interests.It not only sharpens students close-reading skills and deepens their appreciation for the emotional power of poetry, but also connects poetry to the larger world by providing a thorough introduction to poetry 's authorial, cultural, and critical contexts.

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

    Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory. Staying Alive is already an astonishing best-seller in the United Kingdom, where it has gained a wide-ranging audience. This new edition, specially revised for its American readership, reconnects acionados and newcomers alike to the force of poetry, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

    These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).Mister squishy --The soul is not a smithy --Incarnations of burned children --Another pioneer --Good old neon --Philosophy and the mirror of nature --Oblivion --The suffering channel

    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.

    The Poetry of Rilke—the single most comprehensive volume of Rilke’s German poetry ever to be published in English—is the culmination of this effort. With more than two hundred and fifty selected poems by Rilke, including complete translations of the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, The Poetry of Rilke spans the arc of Rilke’s work, from the breakthrough poems of The Book of Hours to the visionary masterpieces written only weeks before his death. This landmark bilingual edition also contains all of Snow’s commentaries on Rilke, as well as an important new introduction by the award-winning poet Adam Zagajewski. The Poetry of Rilke will stand as the authoritative single-volume translation of Rilke into English for years to come.

    Sections group tales together by theme or juxtapose variations of individual tales, inviting comparison and analysis across cultures and genres. An accessible section of critical selections provides a foundation for readers to analyze, debate, and interpret the tales for themselves. An expanded introduction by the editors looks at the history of folk and fairy tales and distinguishes between the genres, while revised introductions to individual sections provide more detailed history of particular tellers and tales, paying increased attention to the background and cultural origin of each tale. A selection of illustrations from editions of classic tales from the 19th to the 21st centuries is also included.

    Nature was the fountainhead of his inspiration and his refuge from what he considered the follies of society. Heedless of his friends’ advice to live in a more orthodox manner, he determinedly pursued his own inner bent, which was that of a poet-philosopher, in prose and verse. Carl Bode brings together the best of Thoreau’s works in The Portable Thoreau, a comprehensive collection of the writings of a unique and profoundly influential American thinker.

    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.

    In this anthology of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, renowned sixties authority Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade. Organized by thematically linked chapters chronicling important social, political, and cultural movements, The Portable Sixties Reader features such luminaries as Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, Denise Levertov, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Ishmael Reed, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Rachel Carson, and Gary Snyder. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives--and deaths--captured the spirit of the decade.Cover photograph by Herbert Orth/TimePix.Contributors that wouldn't fit in the author field:Norman Mailer, Dave Mandel, Peter Matthiessen, Michael McClure, Country Joe McDonald, Thomas Merton, Kate Millett, Janice Mirikitani, N. Scott Momaday, Anne Moody, Larry Neal, Tim O'Brien, Charles Olson, Dan Paik, Rosa Parks, Sylvia Plath, Allen Polite, Dudley Randall, Ishmael Reed, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Muriel Rukeyser, Edward Sanders, Richard Schmorleitz, Anne Sexton, Gary Snyder, Valerie Solanas, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Hunter S. Thompson, Sally Tomlinson, Calvin Trillin, Eric Von Schmidt, Diane Wakoski, Alice Walker, Lew Welch, Eudora Welty, Malcolm X, & Al Young