Vincent Millay to Edward Lear's whimsical "The Owl and the Pussycat" and James Whitcomb Riley’s homespun "When the Frost Is on the Punkin." Famous poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Frost are well-represented, as are less well-known poets such as John McCrae ("In Flanders Fields") and Ernest Thayer ("Casey at the Bat"). Includes 10 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Casey at the Bat," "Jabberwocky," "O Captain! My Captain!," "Paul Revere's Ride," "Ozymandias," "The Raven," "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "Mending Wall," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

    Its symbols smile upon the land, Wrought by Natures wonderous hand; And in their silent beauty speak, Of life and joy, to those who seek For Love Divine and sunny hours In the language of the flowers".

    It also includes a crown of sonnets about e-bay, sestinas on the subjects of Sean Penn and the main characters of fairytales, a pantoum that riffs on a childhood riddle, and a villanelle inspired by bathroom grafitti.

    With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, Middle Passages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. And so Middle Passages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.

    More Happiness Find out why Simplicity is the key to a happy, more joyous existence. The world we live in is getting more complex and stressful every day. Cary David Richards believes that at some point you just need to stop and decide what the things are that are most important to you, focus in on those things and flush the rest of it. Or at least keep it at arm’s length. Mindlessly accumulating “stuff” and competing with your neighbors to see who has the nicest car, greenest lawn or biggest boat in the driveway is not only a merry-go-round of stress and complexity it is also a competition that you can never truly win. In his new book about the virtues of simplifying your life Cary David invites you begin thinking outside the box. Perhaps the old model of a big house, 2 cars in the driveway, 2.5 kids and a mortgage that would choke a horse isn’t what truly speaks to you. If it is that’s okay to but there are lots of other pathways to success. What does success mean to you? Have you really thought about it? Or are you chasing a dream that was strongly suggested to you by your family and or a society that has, for all intents and purposes spun slightly out of control. Discover how to find the simplicity that will bring you the joy and serenity you seek. Learn to live in the moment, reduce the clutter around you, face your fears and embrace change. Does your job empower you? Does it allow you to spend your time and energy focusing on things that are really important to you? Other than a paycheck, why are you there? Did you know there are other ways of structuring (and simplifying) income streams that can allow you to pursue your dreams and passions while not being tied to a desk? Stress, complexity and overwhelm are not the conditions we were designed live under. “Finding Simplicity” will show you a different way. Let Cary David Richards help you find a new path. Identify the things you make your heart sing. Spend your precious time and energy in places and with people that matter to you and simply be in the moment. A joyous new paradigm is waiting so Scroll up to the top and get your copy now!

    Included are such favorites as "Hansel and Gretel," "The Brave Little Tailor," "Cinderella," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Snow White" as well as less familiar ones: "The Danced-Out Shoes," "The Golden Bird," "The Six Swans," "Mother Holle," and "Straw, Coal and Bean." Stanley Appelbaum provides excellent English translations on pages facing the original German, allowing students to read some of the finest stories of the Brothers Grimm in the original while simultaneously improving their German language skills.

    The contributors represent a wide range of professions including Vanguard Group founder John Bogle, MoveOn.org cofounder Joan Blades, several members of Congress, Christian activist Brian McLaren, business guru Peter Senge, and many other leaders from business, medicine, education, nonprofits, law, politics and government, and religion. In their reflections, these leaders explore how they have been inspired by poets such as T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Rumi, May Sarton, Wallace Stevens, Wendell Berry, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Leading from Within is perhaps the most soulful treatment of leadership ever composed. Leadership is first an inner quest, and there is absolutely no better place to explore your inner territory than in the pages of this book. This is an evocative work of art; do yourself an immense favor, and engage with these amazing and diverse leaders and their poems.--Jim Kouzes, coauthor of the bestselling The Leadership Challenge and A Leader's LegacyLeading from Within makes brilliant use of the world's great poets to inspire us to lead with our hearts as well as our heads. It calls to the deeper purpose and meaning within all of us to use our gifts to serve others.--Bill George, author, True North: Discover Your Authentic LeadershipThis is a superb collection of poems and deeply personal reflections from a wide range of real leaders. It is a gift to all of us who believe in bringing our hearts to our work. --Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)The entries in this wonderful anthology are a joy to read and all the more interesting because of their special meaning to the leaders who recommended them. It is a book that every nonprofit leader should place among those they draw upon for inspiration every day.--Diana Aviv, president and CEO, Independent SectorLeading from Within offers a candid view straight into the heart and soul of leaders striving to do good and effective work in the world. The poems and commentaries remind us that leadership is always deeply personal and chock-full of dilemmas that must be addressed by creativity, passion, imagination, and courage.--Jeff Swartz, president and CEO, Timberland

    Tolkien's least-known and hardest-to-find works in one volume. These include "Smith of Wootton Major (story of a magical gift concealed in the most amazing cake), "Farmer Giles of Ham" (a dragon terrorizing the English village of Ham and the townspeople only hope is a local farmer with an inflated reputation of chasing away giants), "Tree and Leaf" (a work consisting of Tolkien's groundbreaking essay "On Fairy-stores" - a most readable examination of the meaning of fantasy), "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" (sixten poems from the Red Book) and "Sir Gawain and teh Green Knight" (Tolkien's first career translation of medieval poetry).

    B.

    In this eminently readable guide to his abiding passion, he has distilled the essense of a library's--and a lifetime's--worth of delight.The pleasures of his own verse can be found in abundance here: economy, a natural ease, and most of all, surprise. What is English poetry? Fenton argues that it includes any recited words in English that marshall rhythm for their meaning--among them prisoners's work songs, Broadway show tunes, and the cries of street vendors captured in verse. From these beginnings, Fenton describes the rudiments of--and, most important, the inspiration for--the musical verse we find in books, and concludes with an illuminating discussion of operas and songs. Fenton illustrates his comments with verse from all over the English-speaking world.Catholic in his taste, shrewd in his distinctions, and charmingly frank, Fenton is an ideal guide to everything to do with poetry, from the temperament of poets to their accomplishment, in all its variety. In all his writing, prose or verse, Fenton has always had the virtue of saying, in a way that seems effortless, precisely what lies at the heart of the matter. In this vein, An Introduction to English Poetry is one of his highest accomplishments.

    Mick Short considers how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carying out stylistic analysis of poetry, drama and prose fiction in turn. He analyses a wide range of extracts from English literature, adopting an accessible approach to the analysis of literary texts which can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages.

    Reverdy’s poetry has exerted a special attraction on American poets, from Kenneth Rexroth to John Ashbery, and this new selection, featuring the work of fourteen distinguished translators, most of it appearing here for the first time, documents that ongoing relationship while offering readers the essential work of an extraordinary writer.Translated from the French by:John Ashbery Dan BellmMary Ann CawsLydia DavisMarilyn HackerRichard HowardGeoffrey O’BrienFrank O’HaraRon PadgettMark PolizzottiKenneth RexrothRichard SieburthPatricia TerryRosanna Warren

    YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly any.Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace’s Ars Poetica to Lars von Trier’s “Vow of Chastity.” Shields has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and, above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now endless controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces, the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about “truthiness,” literary license, quotation, appropriation.Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year.

    This volume provides basic writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, including some not previously translated, along with an invaluable introductory essay by Walter Kaufmann.

    These quotes are a source of inspiration and motivation.Read these quotes to meditate and think about all the wisdom they contain.