The Occasions


Eugenio Montale - 1949
    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.

Selected Writings


Henri Michaux - 1948
    This selection is from L’Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror––where Chaplin meets Kafka––a world of pure and rare invention.

Collected Poems


Primo Levi - 1981
    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.

Sphere: The Form of a Motion


A.R. Ammons - 1974
    R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

Old and New Poems


Donald Hall - 1990
    This volume contains the finest short poetry Donald Hall has written, poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy, poems that have won thousands of readers, as well as various prizes and honors.

Three Plays: Amédée / The New Tenant / Victims of Duty


Eugène Ionesco - 1958
    This crucial collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—the plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.”In Amédée, the title character and his wife have a problem—not so much the corpse in their bedroom as the fact that it’s been there for fifteen years and is now growing, slowly but surely crowding them out of their apartment.In The New Tenant a similar crowding is caused by an excess of furniture—as Harold Hobson said in the London Times, “there is not dramatist . . . who can make furniture speak as eloquently as Ionesco, and here he makes it the perfect, the terrifying symbol of the deranged mind.”In Victims of Duty, Ionesco parodies the conformity of modern life by plunging his characters into an obscure search for “Mallot with a t.” In these as in all his plays, Ionesco poses and solves his tragicomic dilemmas with the brilliant blend of gravity and hilarity that is the hallmark of the absurdist theater.

The Complete Poems


Randall Jarrell - 1981
    His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."The Complete Poems is the definitive volume of Randall Jarrell's verse, including Selected Poems (1955), with notes by the author; The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and The Lost World (1965), "his last and best book," according to Robert Lowell. This volume also brings together several of Jarrell's uncollected or posthumously published poems as well as his Rilke translations.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Revised Edition)


Weldon Kees - 1975
    During Weldon Kees’s life, his poems appeared in all the most prestigious magazines of the day—Poetry (Chicago), the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, and the Nation.

Selected Poems


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

And the Stars Were Shining


John Ashbery - 1994
    With the exception of the title poem, which concludes the volume - a thirteen-part poem of exceptional grace and brilliance - the fifty-eight poems in this collection are mostly short; in their relative brevity they display all the valiant wit and rich lyric intensity which readers know from Ashbery's expansive longer work. The critic Harold Bloom has observed: "And the Stars Were Shining is one of John Ashbery's strongest collections, the title poem his most beautiful long poem yet. He helps to redeem a bad time when many among us have joined in a guilty flight away from the aesthetic."

Collected Poems, 1937-1971


John Berryman - 1989
    A definitive edition of one of America’s most distinguished poets.

Robinson: Selected Poems


Edwin Arlington Robinson - 1965
    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.

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 Collected Poems


Charles Olson - 1987
    His poetry is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. Olson's themes are among the largest conceivable: empowering love, political responsibility, historical discovery and cultural reckoning, the wisdom of dreams and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding. Until recently, Olson's reputation as a major figure in American literature has rested primarily on his theoretical writings and his epic work, the Maximus Poems. With The Collected Poems an even more impressive Olson emerges. This volume brings together all of Olson's work and extends the poetic accomplishment that influenced a generation.Charles Olson was praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors. He was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." His indispensable essays, "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe," and his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, remain as fresh today as when they were written.

Selected Writings


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.