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The Serpent's Teeth
By Ovid. 1955
In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems.When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the…
ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection.Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...Selections from the 'Carmina Burana'
By David Parlett. 1986
This is a selection from the 13the century collection of secular latin poems. Some are serious (eg Crusade poems) but…
the majority are light, including many love poems. A number of items from the Carmina are well known as text for Carl Orff's 'Scenic Cantata'.Selected Works
By Earl Of Rochester. 2004
The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), lived a life of…
reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three - described by Samuel Johnson as having 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness'. Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires and highly explicit erotica - from the bawdy self-portrait in 'The Maimed Debauchee' and the tender passion of 'Absent from thee I languish still' to the comic world-weariness of 'Upon Nothing' and 'A Satyr against Mankind', which mocks human follies. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humour and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.Selected Poetry
By Alexander Pushkin. 2020
WINNER OF THE READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020Alexander Pushkin established what we know as Russian literature. This collection includes his strongly…
personal lyric verse, which springs spontaneously from his everyday life - his numerous loves, his exile, his hectic life in St Petersburg - while the narrative poems here, from exotic Southern tales to comic parodies and fairy tales of enchanted tsars, display his endless ability to surprise. His landmark work The Bronze Horseman, with its ghostly central figure of Peter the Great, holds the meaning of all Russian history. Antony Wood's translations reveal the variety, inventiveness and perfection of Pushkin's verse.Selected Poetry
By Samuel Coleridge. 1994
Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes…
of the human condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics. This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own individual development in craft and theme.Selected Poetry: Poems
By Isabel Quigly, Percy Shelley. 1956
SHELLEY'S WORK HAS BEEN CRITICIZED FOR ITS DIDACTICISM AND UNDISCIPLINED EMOTIONALISM. BUT ESSENTIALLY HE WAS A POET OF IDEAS AND…
IN HIS SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND ORIGINAL HUMAN PERFECTION, SHELLEY WAS INSPIRED AS MUCH BY THE GREEK POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS, PARTICULARLY PLATO, AS BY THE RADICALISM OF HIS OWN AGE. ABOVE ALL, HIS GREAT GIFT WAS HIS LYRICISM AND HIS VERSE COMES AS NEAR TO MUSIC AS POETRY CAN.Selected Poetry
By Goethe. 1999
'Shall I embrace you, must I let you go? Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!'Goethe viewed the…
writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical and the works selected in this volume represent over sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as 'Prometheus' he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervour, while 'To the Moon' is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The Roman Elegies show Goethe's use of Classical metres in homage to abcient Rome and its poets, and 'The Diary' , supressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is unusually combined with its morality. Arranged chronologically, David Luke's verse translations are set alonjgside the German orginals to give a picture of Goethe's poetic development. This edition also includes an introduction and notes placing the poems in the context of the poet's life and times.Selected Poems: Tennyson
By Alfred Lord Tennyson. 2007
Tennyson's poetry epitomizes the Victorian age, for which he became a spokesman. His finest poems are often steeped in a…
sensuous melancholy, as in Maud, or are chivaric, heroic and allegorical, as in The Lady of Shalot and Morte d'Arthur.Selected Poems: Rossetti (Fyfield Bks.)
By Christina Rossetti. 2002
This new selection of Rossetti's poems brings together works by one of the most significant nineteenth-century English poets. It includes…
an illuminating introduction, a chronology of Rossetti's life and works, and explanatory notes.The Selected Poems of Cavafy
By C. P. Cavafy. 2008
C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior…
world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria’s ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as ‘Anna Comnena’ and ‘You did not understand’, while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in ‘Ides of March’, ‘The God Abandoning Antony’ and ‘Nero’s Deadline’. And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in ‘One Night’, ‘I have gazed so much’ and ‘The Café Entrance’, and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in ‘An Old Man’ and ‘Of the Shop’.Selected Poems: Donne
By John Donne. 2006
Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures…
of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Selected Poems reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful Songs and Sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as 'The Flea', which transforms the image of a louse into something marvellous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigour into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.Selected Poems: Blake
By William Blake. 2006
Writer and religious rebel, William Blake ((1757-1827) sowed the seeds for Romanticism in his innovative poems concerning faith and the…
visions that inspired him throughout his life. Whether describing his own spirituality, the innocence of youth or the corruption caused by mankind, his writings depict a world in which spirits dominate and the mind is the gateway to Heaven. This collection of his greatest works spans his entire poetic life from the early, exquisite lyrics of Poetic Sketches to his Songs of Innocence and Experience - a compelling exploration of good and evil. Together, they illuminate a self-made realm that has fascinated artists and poets as diverse as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats and Ginsberg.Selected Poems and Prose
By Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2016
A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.'My name is Ozymandias, King…
of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Adonais', an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include 'To a Skylark', 'Mont Blanc' and 'Ode to the West Wind'. This important new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary and idealistic.This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction, notes and other materials by leading Shelley scholars, Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.Selected Poems and Fragments
By Friedrich Hölderlin. 1994
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe’s supreme poets. He first found his true voice in the…
epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history, from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The ’Canticles of Night’, by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an unprecedented style, which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Together the works collected here show Hölderlin’s use of Classical and Christian imagery and his exploration of cosmology and history in an attempt to find meaning in an uncertain world.Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Patrick Kavanagh. 1956
Published in order of first publication as far as possible, this selection ranges from initial offerings such as 'Tinker's Wife'…
and 'Inniskeen Road: July Evening' to his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger' (1942) and his celebratory later verse, 'To Hell with Common Sense' and 'Come Dance with Kitty Stobling', which show his increasing comic verve and detachment. The first comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry to be published, this volume offers a timely reassessment of a poet unfairly neglected outside Ireland.Selected Poems
By Pierre Ronsard. 2002
Ronsard is considered one of France's greatest love poets, yet his poetic achievements are not restricted to his verses of…
love, wine and nature. A true Renaissance figure, his themes ranged from politics, science and philsophy, to the bawdy and risqué. Using Greco-Roman and Italian poetic models, and drawing on the rich images of classical mythology, Ronsard revolutionised the tradition of French poetry. In the 20th century, Ronsard's poetry was influential for W. B. Yeats, translated by Sylvia Plath, and illustrated by Henri Matisse. He stands as one of the most innovative and diverse voices in the history of European poetry.Selected Poems
By John Dryden. 2001
A new and comprehensive selection of Dryden's poetry, revealing him as a master of theatricality, ventriloquism, and unmistakable originality. Brought…
together here are many of the poems from his time as Poet Laureate and loyal servant of the crown, including the Biblical allegory 'Absalom and Achitophel', in which the poet attacked those who intrigued against the King and earned himself a reputation for menace and a number of powerful enemies. His 'Works of Virgil' set the standard for the translation of Latin poetry. His last work, 'Fables Ancient and Modern' combined original verse and new translations, showing how he transformed the idioms and gestures of other voices and made them his own.Selected Poems
By D. H. Lawrence. 2008
From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts…
and Flowers (1923) the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets.This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some his most famous poems, such as 'Piano', a nostalgic reflection on lost youth and love for his mother; 'Snake', exploring human fear of the natural world; the short, cutting comment on sexual politics of 'Can't Be Borne'; and the quiet philosophical resignation of 'Basta!'. Using the revised poems, but in the order in which they appeared in their original collections, this selection offers a fresh perspective that reveals an innovative poet who gave voice to his most intense emotions.Selected Poems: Selected Poems And Prose
By Charles-Pierre Baudelaire. 1972
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by…
French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.Selected Poems: Selected Poems (Collins Classics Ser.)
By Rabindranath Tagore. 2010
The poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) are among the most haunting and tender in Indian and in world literature, expressing…
a profound and passionate human yearning. His ceaselessly inventive works deal with such subjects as the interplay between God and the world, the eternal and transient, and with the paradox of an endlessly changing universe that is in tune with unchanging harmonies. Poems such as 'Earth' and 'In the Eyes of a Peacock' present a picture of natural processes unaffected by human concerns, while others, as in 'Recovery - 14', convey the poet's bewilderment about his place in the world. And exuberant works such as 'New Rain' and 'Grandfather's Holiday' describe Tagore's sheer joy at the glories of nature or simply in watching a grandchild play.