With rich and fascinating tales of swords, tigers, tea, flowers and dogs, the writings of the Masters challenge every perception - and seek to bring all readers closer to enlightenment. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

    Its structure has become popular in other languages and today it is probably the best know form of poetry worldwide.There are few rules to haiku, but they are strict: 17 phonetic sounds, a sense of cutting images or ideas, and a reference to a season. From those restrictions, poets have written about many things, from the year’s first blossom to aging, from mosquitoes humming to insects singing, from catching one’s shadow to crossing a stream in the summer.Haiku features 90 classic poems from four poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki which range across more than 200 years of Japanese poetry.In Haiku, each poem is presented in Japanese script, along with romanized Japanese (romaji) and an English translation. Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding and with a timeless design, Haiku is an expert introduction and celebration of one of the most beautiful and accessible forms of poetry in the world.

    'But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet...'By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century's greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.

    In the most complete, well-ordered philosophical system of his day, Xunzi advocated the counteraction of man's evil through self-improvement, the pursuit of learning, the avoidance of obsession, and observance of ritual in life. Readers familiar with Xunzi's work will find that Burton Watson's lucid translation breathes new life into this classic. Those new to Xunzi will find his ideas on government, language, and order and safety in society surprisingly close to concerns of our own age.

    Carry your sword, my prophetess. Obstinate contumacy training. Find the objective that is more draining. More strenuous tasks will make you grow. Pain upon you I bestow. I’ll take it all and nothing less. I claim it back; I repossess. Tip the scale; Turn it over. Mark the unused; What’s leftover. The main part no longer exists; Despite the reduction, it persists. Continued movement; A quest for traction. An opposite and negative reaction. Hex induced metamorphosis; Reoccur once again for us. Physically and internally changing. The process of rearranging. The alteration was so fitting. Now they’re pausing; They’re intermitting. In reaffirming the causation; Keep kempt, and maintain your original explanation. Wear our serpent, prophetess; Prior to you was profitless. The soil was sown with no reaping. Tear our hearts out for your keeping. Beyond the boundaries of what is permitted. Reward me for the sins I’ve committed. My acts were bold; Caress my flesh. I give it all and nothing less. The facsimile will shudder. Express what it is I utter. Amidst psychos and others. Among psychos and others. Live with vigor; Efficiently transfigure. Disfigure; Change his figure. Make it so; Mark the torso. Undergo; Nock the torso. Let it grow; Open the torso. Let him know; Carve the torso.

    During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body of poems that range from the exquisite to the obsene, while simultaneously living a life of dissolute excess with his lover and fellow poet, Verlaine. At the age of 21, he abandonned poetry and travelled across Europe before settling in Africa as an arms trader. This edition sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a sparkling translation of his most exhilarating poetry and a generous selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    And this tree, so complete in itself, Is only part of the mountain. And the mountain runs down to the sea. And the sea, so complete in itself, Rests like a raindrop On the hand of God. Ruskin Bond's Book of Verse brings together the poetry of one of India's best-loved writers. This charming collector's edition is a treasury of poems on love and nature, travel, humour and childhood, and will be a lasting source of delight to readers.

    Inside the Forbidden City, she witnessed seductions, plots, murders, and brazen acts of treason. Propelled by a shrewd intelligence, an extraordinary persistence, and a friendship with the imperial heir, she rose through the ranks to become the first Empress of China. On the one hand, she was a political mastermind who quelled insurrections, eased famine, and opened wide the routes of international trade. On the other, she was a passionate patron of the arts who brought Chinese civilization to unsurpassed heights of knowledge, beauty, and sophistication.And yet, from the moment of her death to the present day, her name has been sullied, her story distorted, and her memoirs obliterated by men taking vengeance on a women who dared become Emperor. For the first time in thirteen centuries, Empress Wu flings open the gates of her Forbidden City and tells her own astonishing tale–revealing a fascinating, complex figure who in many ways remains modern to this day.

    Keats wrote the first five poems, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche" in quick succession during the spring, and he composed "To Autumn" in September.As a whole, the odes represent Keats's attempt to create a new type of short lyrical poem, which influenced later generations.

    High-school student Jingqiu is one of many educated urban youth sent to the countryside to be "re-educated" under a dictate from Chairman Mao. Jing's father is a political prisoner somewhere in China, and her mother, a former teacher branded as a "capitalist," is now reduced to menial work to support Jing and her two younger siblings.When Jing arrives with a group at Xiping village in the Yangtze River's Three Gorges region, she meets geology student Jianxin, nicknamed "Old Three," who is the son of a high-ranking military officer, but whose mother committed suicide after being branded a "rightist." Despite their disparate social backgrounds and a political atmosphere that forbids the relationship, Jingqiu and Jianxin fall desperately in love. But their budding romance is cut short by fate...A sensitive and searing love story, Under the Hawthorn Tree is sure to become an instant classic.

    late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse.Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's voice, whose telltale charm, authority, immediacy, directness, intensity, and sudden changes of tone are among the hallmarks of his masterly translation.Pamela Gordon introduces us to the world of Sappho, discusses questions surrounding the transmission of her manuscripts, offers advice on reading these texts, and concludes with an enlightening discussion of same-sex desire in Sappho.

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

    The public recitation of his 1933 poem known in English as "The Stalin Epigram" led to his arrest, exile, and eventual imprisonment in a Siberian transit camp, where he died, presumably in 1938. Mandelstam's work, much of it written under extreme duress, is an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the face of oppression and terror.Stolen Air spans Mandelstam's entire poetic career, from his early highly formal poems in which he reacted against Russian Symbolism to the poems of anguish and defiant abundance written in exile, when Mandelstam became a truly great poet. Aside from the famous early poems, which have a sharp new vitality in Wiman's versions, Stolen Air includes large selections from The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks.Going beyond previous translators who did not try to reproduce Mandelstam's music, Christian Wiman has captured in English for the first time something of Mandelstam's enticing, turbulent, and utterly heartbreaking sounds.

    This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- "Harmonium"- "Ideas of Order"- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"- "Parts of the World"- "Transport Summer"- "The Auroras of Autumn"- "The Rock"