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Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats
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The Sixteen Satires
Juvenal
AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor, and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors and gladiators, and of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern and upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony and invective make his work a stunningly satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society
The Selected Poetry
Robinson Jeffers - 1938
For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general readers to keep Jeffers—in spite of the almost total academic neglect that followed his fame in the 1920s and 1930s—a force in American poetry.Now scholars are at last beginning to recognize that he created a significant alternative to the High Modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. Similarly, contemporary poets who have returned to the narrative poem acknowledge Jeffers to be a major poet, while those exploring California and the American West as literary regions have found in him a foundational figure. Moreover, Jeffers stands as a crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world and the environment.These developments underscore the need for a new selected edition that would, like the 1938 volume, include the long narratives that were to Jeffers his major work, along with the more easily anthologized shorter poems. This new selected edition differs from its predecessor in several ways. When Jeffers shaped the 1938 Selected Poetry, he drew from his most productive period (1917-37), but his career was not over yet. In the quarter century that followed, four more volumes of his poetry were published. This new selected edition draws from these later volumes, and it includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along with several prose pieces in which he reflects on his poetry and poetics.This edition also adopts the texts of the recently completed The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (five volumes, Stanford, 1988-2000). When the poems were originally published, copy editors and typesetters adjusted Jeffers's punctuation, often obscuring the rhythm and pacing of what he actually wrote, and at points even obscuring meaning and nuance. This new selected edition, then, is a much broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers's career than the previous Selected Poetry.Reviews of volumes inThe Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers"A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book begins an edition intended to clarify a 'Jeffers canon,' establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes of eternity."—San Francisco Chronicle"This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal and public canons."—Virginia Quarterly Review"Jeffers is the last of the major poets of his generation—Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot—to get his collected poems. Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well. . . . Tim Hunt has been painstaking in his editorial preparation and judicious in his presentation. . . . A great poet is ready for his due."—Philadelphia Inquirer"Few American poets are treated as well by publishers as Jeffers is by Stanford University Press. . . . These poems represent a distinctive voice in the American canon, and it is good to have them so wonderfully set forth."—Christian Century
The Other Two
Edith Wharton - 1904
Shamefacedly, in indirect ways, he had been finding out about Haskett; and all that he had learned was favorable. The little man, in order to be near his daughter, had sold out his share in a profitable business in Utica, and accepted a modest clerkship in a New York manufacturing house. He boarded in a shabby street and had few acquaintances. His passion for Lily filled his life. Waythorn felt that this exploration of Haskett was like groping about with a dark-lantern in his wife's past.
A Shropshire Lad
A.E. Housman - 1896
E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Scholars and critics have seen in these timeless poems an elegance of taste and perfection of form and feeling comparable to the greatest of the classic. Yet their simple language, strong musical cadences and direct emotional appeal have won these works a wide audience among general readers as well.This finely produced volume, reprinted from an authoritative edition of A Shropshire Lad, contains all 63 original poems along with a new Index of First Lines and a brief new section of Notes to the Text. Here are poems that deal poignantly with the changing climate of friendship, the fading of youth, the vanity of dreams — poems that are among the most read, shared, and quoted in our language.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Joyce Carol Oates - 1994
Daly, Christina Marsden Gillis, Don Moser, Tom Quirk, B. Ruby Rich, R.J.R. Rockwood, Larry Rubin, Gretchen Schulz, Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski, Joyce M. Wegs, Marilyn C. Wesley, and Joan D. Winslow.
Blood Brothers
Willy Russell - 1985
She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons and they grow up as friends in ignorance of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a blood-bath.
'Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit story about the working of fate and destiny … it carries one along with it in almost unreserved enjoyment" Guardian
One of the longest-running and most successful ever West End musicals, Blood Brothers premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in January 1983.
A Doll's House and Other Plays
Henrik Ibsen - 1960
The League of Youth was Ibsen's first venture into realistic social drama and marks a turning-point in his style. By 1879 Ibsen was convinced that women suffer an inevitable violation of their personalities within the context of marriage. In A Doll's House, Ibsen caused a sensation with the his portrayal of Nora Helmer, a woman who, gradually arriving at an understanding of her own misery, struggles to break free from the stifling confines of her marriage. Continuing the theme of tensions within the family in The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen put forward the view that freedom with responsibility might at least be a step in the right direction. Peter Watts's lively modern translation is accompanied by an introduction examining Ibsen's life and times, with individual discussions of each of the three plays. 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.
The Mikado
W.S. Gilbert - 1885
The tale unfolds amid a fanciful version of Japanese society, in which a wandering minstrel has the misfortune to fall in love with the beautiful ward of the Lord High Executioner of Titipu.The sparkling lyrics and witty dialogue of this comic masterpiece are as much a delight to read as they are to hear with musical accompaniment. The complete libretto is reprinted in this edition from the standard performance text of The Mikado, complete with nine charming illustrations drawn by W. S. Gilbert himself.
Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes - 1998
And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
Jerome Lawrence - 1971
Three years earlier, Thoreau had put his belief into action and refused to pay taxes because of the United States government's involvement in the Mexican War, which Thoreau firmly believed was unjust. For his daring and unprecedented act of protest, he was thrown in jail. The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is a celebrated dramatic presentation of this famous act of civil disobedience and its consequences. Its poignant, lively, and accessible scenes offer a compelling exploration of Thoreau's philosophy and life.
English Victorian Poetry: An Anthology
Paul NegriLewis Carroll - 1998
An Introduction and brief biographical notes on the poets are included.
The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology
Kevin Crossley-Holland - 1982
But, besides this, chronicles, laws and letters, charters and charms are also incorporated in the anthology. Kevin Crossley-Holland places poems and prose in context with his own interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon world, in addition to translate them into modern English.
Modern Love
George Meredith - 1862
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.