They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even while facing the firing squad. “Quick, direct, witty, pungent” (DeWitt Beall, Chicago Daily News).

    This collection features dozens of newly translated poems interspersed with legends and stories of their lives, presenting an intimate portrait of their communion and allowing readers to eavesdrop on their unique spiritual dialogue.

    It is perhaps because of this that the poem is still popular with and of interest to modern readers. Owing to its length and its arguable breadth of focus, the poem might not be thought an elegy or a dirge in the strictest formal sense.The poem is not arranged exactly in the order in which it was written. The prologue, for example, is thought to have been one of the last things written. Critics believe, however, that the poem as a whole is meant to be chronological in terms of the progression of Tennyson's grief. The passage of time is marked by the three descriptions of Christmas at different points in the poem, and the poem ends with a description of the marriage of Tennyson's sister."In Memoriam" is written in four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter, and such stanzas are now called In Memoriam Stanzas. Though not metrically unusual, given the length of the work, the meter creates a tonal effect which often divides readers - is it the natural sound of mourning and grief, or merely monotonous? The poem is divided into 133 cantos (including the prologue and epilogue), and in contrast to its constant and regulated metrical form, encompasses many different subjects: profound spiritual experiences, nostalgic reminiscence, philosophical speculation, Romantic fantasizing and even occasional verse. The death of Hallam, and Tennyson's attempts to cope with this, remain the strand that ties all these together.Excerpt: Strong Son of God, immortal Love,Whom we, that have not seen thy face,By faith, and faith alone, embrace,Believing where we cannot prove ;Thine are these orbs of light and shade ;Thou madest Life in man and brute ;[...]

    Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

    Over 100 complete and unabridged poems are accompanied by a concise text that provides insight, observations, and a historical context for each poet and their work.

    In the words of Carolyn Forché, "he is a living treasure."

    Sewall's monumental biography of the great American poet (1830-1886), won the National Book Award when it was originally published in two volumes. Now available in a one-volume edition, it has been called "by far the best and most complete study of the poet's life yet to be written, the result of nearly twenty years of work" (The Atlantic).R.W.B. Lewis has hailed it as "a major event in American letters," adding that "Richard Sewall's biographical vision of Emily Dickinson is as complete as human scholarship, ingenuity, stylistic pungency, and common sense can arrive at."

    Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

    It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was critically acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.

    But it goes much further: there is a deepening of vision and a darker understanding of "our clay condition." The six long poems in The Secret Meaning of Things show a progressive continuity and clarity of perception that apprehends both the hard reality and luminous irreality in everyday phenomena. In "Assassination Raga"––on the death of Robert Kennedy––the glass through which the poet sees darkly is the television screen; the poem was first read on the night of RFK’s funeral at a mass memorial in San Francisco. "Bickford’s Buddha" is a meditation on "Observation Fever" in Harvard Square, while "All Too Clearly" finds a "touch of old surrealism/at a stoplight in La Jolla." "Through the Looking Glass" begins with an actual flight aboard a commercial airliner and moves through a psychedelic vision to a final flash of the Dance of Shiva, which in turn opens out into the worldview of "After the Cries of Birds." "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow" comes out of Ferlinghetti’s travels to Moscow and across the steppes in the winter of 1967.

    It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the American Book Award.

    Svidrigailov simply is the most memorable figure in the book, obscuring Raskolnikov, who after all is the protagonist, a hero-villain, and a kind of surrogate for Dostoevsky himself.

    Truthful and magical, his poetry has captivated both Greek and foreign readers. Aptly described by Charlotte Du Cann as 'the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages', Seferis was for Peter Levi 'one of the greatest writers in this century in any language...From Seferis it was possible to learn...what seriousness about poetry is'.

    There are 366 poems (one for each day of the year, and one for leap years), to delight, inspire and excite. Chosen for their magic and memorability, the poems in this anthology are an exultant mix of old and new from across the world, poems to learn by heart and take to heart.

    From the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), Frost was recognized as a poet of unique power and formal skill, and the enduring significance of his work has been acknowledged by each subsequent generation. His poetry ranges from deceptively simply pastoral lyrics and genial, vernacular genre pieces to darker meditations, complex and ironic.Here, based on extensive research into his manuscripts and published work, is the first authoritative and truly comprehensive collection of his writings. Brought together for the first time in a Library of America single volume is all the major poetry, a generous selection of uncollected poems, all of Frost’s dramatic writing, and the most extensive gathering of his prose writings ever published, several of which are printed here for the first time.The core of this collection is the 1949 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, the last collection supervised by Frost himself. This version of the poems is free of unauthorized editorial changes introduced into subsequent editions. Also included is In the Clearing (1962), Frost’s final volume of poetry. Verse drawn from letters, articles, pamphlets, and journals makes up the largest selection of uncollected poems ever assembled, including nearly two dozen beautiful early works printed for the first time. Also gathered here are all the dramatic works: three plays and two verse masques.The unprecedented prose section includes more than three times as many items as any other collection available. It is rich and diverse, presenting many newly discovered or rediscovered pieces. Especially unusual items include Frost’s contribution to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and two fascinating 1959 essays on “The Future of Man.” Several manuscript items are published here for the first time, including the essays “‘Caveat Poeta’” and “The Way There,” Frost’s remarks on being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1958, the preface to a proposed new edition of North of Boston, and many others. A selection of letters represents all of Frost’s important comments about prosody, poetics, style, and his theory of “sentence sounds.”