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Selected Poems
by Gwendolyn BrooksThe classic volume by the distinguished modern poet, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, showcases an esteemed artist's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world.
Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu D. C. LauIn eighty-one brief chapters, Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao-- the basic principle of the universe.
Telephone Poles and Other Poems
by John UpdikeWHEN, five years and five books of fiction ago, THE CARPENTERED HEN, John Updike's first collection of verse, was published, Phyllis McGinley wrote: "I have been happily reading Mr. Updike in The New Yorker for some time and am happy, now, to own him collected. When he first appeared in that magazine, I was so elated to see a new name in light verse that I felt like crying with the Ancient Mariner 'A Sail, A Sail!' His is what poetry of this sort exactly out to be--playful but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty." In the Saturday Review, David McCord wrote: "Furthermore, he is a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been; as Betjeman and McGinley frequently are." This second collection is equally divided between poems that, in their verbal jugglery and humorous bias, seem to qualify as "light" and poems that, one way or other, cross the problematic border into the general realm of poetry. The distinction cannot be clear-cut. The poet is consistently concerned with Man's cosmic embarrassment, and the same vision illuminates the creatures of "The High Hearts" and "Seagulls." Science and religion, so frequently and variously invoked, frame a single paradox, the paradox of the mundane; and each poem, whether inspired by an antic headline or a suburban landscape, rejoices in the elusive surface of created things.
Colors Are Nice (Little Golden Book)
by Adelaide HollA beloved 1962 Little Golden Book about colors (and not just primary ones) is back in print!"I like the way the sky is blue,And I like orange oranges, too.But I LOVE mixed-up colors best—A baby robin's speckled breast,Blackish dots on greenish frogs,Rainbow beetles under logs."This poetic look at colors, told in simple rhyme, celebrates not only primary colors, but "colors all mixed up!" Cheerful, elegant rhyme teaches about stripes, sparkles, and spots on adorable animals and in beautiful landscapes. Noted illustrator Leonard Shortall's lush illustrations of adorable animals and children will once again captivate little ones.
The Colossus
by Sylvia PlathWith this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Colossus & Other Poems
by Sylvia PlathWith this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.
The Compendium of Erotica: Dictionary of Erotic Literature, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, and Love Potions Through the Ages
by Harry E. WedeckExplore what sent hearts a flutter through the centuries in this compilation of erotic cultural and literary history.Dictionary of Erotic LiteratureRepresenting cultures around the world and spanning from ancient times to the twentieth century, this A-to-Z guide explores one of the most universal and enduring themes in literature. Entries range from Ovid&’s Ars amatoria, second-century Gnosticism, and ninth-century Arabian poets, all the way up to the explicit novels published in Paris in the 1960s.As author Harry E. Wedeck explains in his introduction, a culture&’s artistic and literary depictions of eroticism reveal a great deal about their way of life. In Dictionary of Erotic Literature, Wedeck draws on this endlessly vast topic to present an illustrative sampling of authors, written works, and terminology that will be of value to any student of literature or cultural history.Dictionary of AphrodisiacsFrom absinthe, almond soup, and Albertus Magnus to yarrow, yohimbine, and Émile Zola,this authoritative reference volume covers knowledge of aphrodisiacs spanning centuries and drawn from literature, spirituality, and ancient science. Entries include edible substances believed to enhance sexual performance, gemstones thought to possess amorous charms, gods and goddesses of love from various myths, and historic figures who contributed to studies and thought on aphrodisiacs.This dictionary reveals many intriguing ways for partners to enrich their relationships, including recipes to stimulate the gourmet lover using the many ingredients described in the book.Love Potions Through the AgesThis survey explores the evolution of love potion practices in societies over the centuries and across the world. Separate chapters focus on ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Orient, as well as the Middle Ages and modern times. Wedeck relays the spiritual aspects of these concoctions as well as historical anecdotes about them. Recipes are also included, though Wedeck cautions that they are exclusively for academic purposes and not intended for personal use.
Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric (Routledge Revivals: Critical Essays on Roman Literature #1)
by J P SullivanFirst published in 1962, this book is the first of two volumes which bridge the gap between the study of classics and the study of literature and attempt to reconcile the two disciplines. Focusing on elegy and lyric, this collection of essays offers a critical examination of Latin literature and aims to stimulate critical discussion of a selection of Latin poets. This experimental and ground-breaking book will be of particular interest to students of Roman Literature, Classics and Poetry.
Dictionary of Erotic Literature
by Harry E. WedeckThis wide-ranging reference volume offers an in-depth survey of erotic themes through centuries of literary history.Representing cultures around the world and spanning from ancient times to the twentieth century, this A-to-Z guide explores one of the most universal and enduring themes in literature. Entries range from Ovid&’s Ars amatoria, second-century Gnosticism, and ninth-century Arabian poets, all the way up to the explicit novels published in Paris in the 1960s. As Harry E. Wedeck explains in his introduction, a culture&’s artistic and literary depictions of eroticism reveal a great deal about their way of life. In Dictionary of Erotic Literature, Wedeck draws on this endlessly vast topic to present an illustrative sampling of authors, written works, and terminology that will be of value to any student of literature or cultural history.
Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007
by Lewis TurcoThis is the long-awaited collection of Lewis Turco's poems, comprising a dozen books in one. Rhina P. Espaillat, poet, concludes her Foreword to the book with these words: "And how fortunate the reading public is to have this wealth of writing by one of the country¿s most interesting poets now in one volume, not so much a book as a library of books, composed by the many persons who inhabit this haunted and perceptive poet! It belongs on the bookshelf of every reader willing to risk the joy and anguish of hearing the world, having it speak to him as vividly, ambiguously and honestly as it speaks to Lewis Turco."
For Love: Poems 1950-1960
by Robert Creeley"At its concentrated best, the sting of this poetry is indelible. Formally the poems are miniatures... but there is nothing of the miniature in the power that they release. . . . Theirs is the compression of the lyric epigram, taut, hard, constrained, graven upon the page." -Dudley Fitts, Saturday Review
The Mentor Book of Major American Poets
by Oscar Williams Edwin HonigA compact anthology of 3 centuries of poetry by 20 great American poets.
Mirror of Minds: Psychological Beliefs in English Poetry
by Geoffrey BulloughThe aim of the author, who has long been interested in the history of ideas, has been to give some illustrations of the ways in which at various periods English poetry has reflected current views of the human mind, with special reference to such topics as its place in the cosmos, its relations with the body, the connections between sense, passions, and reason, the problem of soul and its possible survival after death. The subject matter is important, for many of the more self-conscious writers have been profoundly affected by their assumptions about the senses and passions, the reason and the imagination.The author traces four main historical phases in each of which different aspects and potentialities of the mind have been stressed. Chapter I discusses the microcosmic conception of man inherited from the Middle Ages and traces its influence in some allegorical and didactic verse, lyric and epic. Chapter II considers the development of Shakespeare's attitude to the mind and human character. Chapter III turns to some effects (between Dryden and Wordsworth) of the seventeenth-century revolution in philosophy and science, including the search for clarity and order, the Augustan interest in reason and the passions, and the rise of the association of psychology. Chapter IV shows how the Romantic poets made use of associations and intuitions, and discusses the Victorian poets' hopes and fears about immortality in relation to the advance of science. The last chapter traces the influence of the philosophy of the "moment" from the aesthetes to T.S. Eliot, and distinguishes the effects of some twentieth-century psychologies in modern poetry.Poets, of course, have rarely been systematic philosophers or psychologists; they have usually picked out and applied imaginatively only a few notions from contemporary thought. Consequently this study does not attempt to set the history of English poetry squarely against the history of philosophy. Rather, characteristic topics and writers have been selected and the discussion of them will be seen to throw light on some major imaginative preoccupations of each age. The student of English poetry and the history of ideas will find valuable comments on the major writers from Chaucer and Spenser down through Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and on a variety of modern poets such as Bridges, Eliot, Sitwell, Auden, and Graces.Alexander Lecture Series.
Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel: A Poem
by Evan S. ConnellPraise for Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"A unique tour de force" -The New York Times Book Review"One of the most remarkable books that I have read in a long time." -Kenneth Rexroth"Mr. Connell's NOTES are what one intelligent, sensitive artist has been able to salvage from all experience as testimony to the rather pathetic integrity of the human species in the face of extinction. The book is no manual or tract, however, although its political meaning is unmistakable, but a work of art, even a work of high art." -Hayden Carruth
The Poetic Edda
by Lee M. HollanderThe Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times. Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf. "
The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems
by William Carlos WilliamsHere is a perfect little gift: the most beloved poems by the most essential American poet of the last century Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams’s astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader—The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems is a book to be treasured.
Romantic Paradox: An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth (RLE: Wordsworth and Coleridge #2)
by C.C. ClarkeFirst published in 1962, this book reveals unexpected complexity or equivocation in Wordsworth’s use of certain key words, particularly ‘image’, ‘form’ and ‘shape’. The author endeavours to show that this complexity is related to the poet’s awareness of the ambiguity of the perceptual process. Numerous passages from The Prelude and other poems are analysed to illustrate the argument and to show that, because of this doubt or hidden perplexity, Wordsworth’s poetry has a far richer texture, is more concentrated, intricately organised and loaded with ambivalent meanings than it would otherwise have been. New light is also shed on Wordsworth’s debt to Akenside.
Routledge Revivals: Values and Traditions (Routledge Revivals)
by B. Ifor EvansFirst published in 1962, this book is a reflection on Sir Ifor Evans’s well-known A Short History of English Literature. In this reflective study, Evans wonders if it is possible to trace permanent elements in such a huge and varied mass of writings? As he moves from the Anglo-Saxon Caedmon to T.S Eliot, or from Milton to James Joyce, he finds out how, in unexpected ways, the English spirit of compromise extends into its literature, along with its love of nature and interest in the individual. In poetic imagery above all the British genius seems, typically, to have found a way of making ‘empiricism transcendental’. This book, which had its origin during the war under the aegis of the British Council, provides the reader with a stimulating passport to a very rich kingdom.
Silence in the Snowy Fields: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Robert BlyThe poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.
The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Program)
by John AshberyJohn Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.
The Ways of White Folks: Stories
by Langston HughesIn these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s.
A World of Love and Mystery
by Walden Scott CramA World of Love and Mystery is a collection of poetry divided into three parts written by the poet Walden Scott Cram.
Yevtushenko: Selected Poems
by Yevgeny YevtushenkoThis volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. ‘Zima Junction’ vividly describes his idyllic childhood in Siberia and his impressions of home after a long absence in Moscow. Private moments are captured in ‘Waking’, on the joys of discovering the unexpected in a lover, and ‘Birthday’, on a mother’s concern for her son, while ‘Encounter’ depicts an unexpected meeting with Hemingway in Copenhagen. ‘The Companion’ and ‘Party Card’ show war from a child’s eye, whether playing while oblivious to German bombs falling nearby or discovering a fatally wounded soldier in the forest, while Yevtushenko’s famous poem, ‘Babiy Yar’, is an angry exposé of the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev.
You Read To Me, I'll Read To You
by John Ciardi‘Thirty-five imaginative and humorous poems for an adult and a child to read aloud together. . . . The entertaining verses are varied as to length, rhythm, and subject and are illustrated with harmoniously amusing drawings. ’ —BL.