Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.

    At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns ("Tilbury Down" and "The Mill"), the tyranny of love ("Eros Turrannos" and "The Unforgiven"), and unspoken, unnoticed suffering ("The Wandering Jew", and "Isaac and Archibald"). In addition, the fictional characters he created in "Reuben Bright", "Miniver Cheevy", "Richard Cory", and the historical figures he brought to life -- Lincoln in "The Master" and the great painter in "Rembrandt to Rembrandt" -- harbor demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an Introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to new readers.

    Throughout his writing life, Levi also produced poetry and this volume collects together all his poems, including eighteen that have not previously appeared in book form. Short and spare, the poems employ the same courageous and steady gaze at the worst that can happen that illuminates his prose.

    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

    Philip Levine's New Selected Poems (1984) by adding to it a generous choice of major from each of the two volumes that followed it: Sweet Will (1985) and A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988).

    This book is his most experimental work, but a work no less tradition-saturated than Eliot's. As poet, private individual, and "good European", Montale's way of dealing with his difficulties was to seize the occasions offered him by writing poetry in which the lover's passions for his beloved country would convey the truth of both his public and his private situations.

    With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence upon modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.Selected Poems contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of his work. Harold Bloom has contributed a new Foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The inclusion of several pivotal poems from previous editions broadens the scope of the work to represent Aiken's legacy.

    Heaney's pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of dream encounters which lead him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years." It is preceded by a section of richly meditative lyrics ("Wry, spare, compressed, subtle, strange, they have a furtive intensity and exicitement." - Richard Ellmann, The New York Review of Books), and leads naturally into a third group of poems, in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary Sweeney, a king of Ulster whose story Heaney translated from the Irish.

    Lying still in snow,not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willingnot to meet until heaven, but here and theretreading slubby kissing stops, our trackswobble across the snow their long scratch.So many things that happen here are really little more,if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,are almost ready, already, to bandage the onewhom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how whenwe might lose each other, scratches scratches scratchesfrom this moment to that. Then I will go backto that silent evening, when the past just managedto overlap the future, if only by a trace,and the light doubles and caststhrough the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.

    Warren wrote enduring fiction as well as influential works of literary criticism and theory. Yet, as this variorum edition of his published poems suggests, it is his poetry - spanning sixty years, sixteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles - that places Warren among America's foremost men of letters. In this volume, John Burt, Warren's literary executor, has gathered together every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren's poems - in some cases, a poem appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line - as well as the author's typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in hand, Burt has referred to Warren's personal library copies. A record of Burt's comprehensive analysis is found in this edition's textual notes, list of emendations, and explanatory notes.

    Deciding that his battalion has been 'doping off', Colonel Templeton calls for a 36-mile forced march to inculcate discipline. The Long March is a searing account of this ferocious ordeal - and of the two officers who resist.

    For this new paperback edition, Mr. Burke continues his "curve of development" in an Addendum which surveys the course of his though in subsequent books (up to the publication of his Collected Poems, 1915 - 1967) and work-in-progress.

    His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age. Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.

    Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people.  Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives.  Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.

    "On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet," commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, her Selected Poems (New Directions, 1964). The Selected won her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie in 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smith’s first published collection (London, 1937) was A Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, "images of joy and terror." A Newsweek reviewer wrote, "Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong."