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Selected Journalism 1850-1870
by Charles DickensThroughout his writing career Charles Dickens was a hugely prolific journalist. This volume of his later work is selected from pieces that he wrote after he founded the journal Household Words in 1850 up until his death in 1870. Here subjects as varied as his nocturnal walks around London slums, prisons, theatres and Inns of Court, journeys to the continent and his childhood in Kent and London are captured in remarkable pieces such as 'Night Walks', 'On Strike', 'New Year's Day' and 'Lying Awake'. Aiming to catch the imagination of a public besieged by hack journalism, these writings are an extraordinary blend of public and private, news and recollection, reality and fantastic description.
Selected Letters
by CiceroThe greatest orator in Roman history, Marcus Tullius Cicero remained one of the republic's chief supporters throughout his life, guided by profound political beliefs that illuminated his correspondence with both close friends and powerful aristocrats. A chronicle of a crumbling civilization during the era when the republic disintegrated and was replaced by despotism, his Letters portray a world dominated by characters who have since acquired almost mythic status - including Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony. Whether describing the vagaries of war, the collapse of Roman society, his beloved republic, or his own personal domestic dramas, all compellingly reflect the complex personality of an honourable and selfless man whose refusal to compromise ultimately cost him his life.
Selected Letters: The Complete Poems And Selected Letters (Collins Classics Ser.)
by John Keats'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817.In a period of great letter-writing, Keats's letters are outstanding. They begin in summer 1816, as he approached his twenty-first birthday, and were written over the next four years until his early death. Viewed together, they give the fullest and most poignant record we have of Keats's ambitions and hopes as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his brothers and young sister, and, later, his passionate, jealous and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne.Keats enclosed many of his poems with his letters, and read together, they offer an incomparable insight into his creative process and development as a poet. This major new edition edited by Professor John Barnard includes an introduction and notes, as well as a map of Keats's Scottish walking tour and reproductions of his letters.John Keats was born in October 1795. His Poems appeared in 1817, while Endymion was published in 1818, both to mixed reviews. In 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the major odes, Lamia and the Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing his 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821, in a rented apartment next to the Spanish Steps, at the age of twenty-five.John Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds and has edited The Complete Poems of Keats for Penguin Classics.
Selected Letters
by Madame SevigneOne of the world's greatest correspondents, Madame de Sévigné (1626-96) paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of France at the time of Louis XIV, in eloquent letters written throughout her life to family and friends. A significant figure in French society and literary circles, whose close friends included Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, she reflected on both significant historical events and personal issues, and in this selection of the most significant letters, spanning almost fifty years, she is by turns humorous and melancholic, profound and superficial. Whether describing the new plays of Racine and Molière, speculating on court scandals - including the intrigues of the King's mistresses - or relating her own family concerns, Madame de Sévigné provides throughout an intriguing portrait of the lost age of Le Roi Soleil.
Selected Plays (Penguin Modern Classics)
by William YeatsThe 18 plays are: The Shadowy Waters; Cathleen in Houlihan; The Hour Glass; On Baile's Strabd; The Green Helmet; Deirdre; At the Hawk's Well; The Dreaming of the Bones; The Cat and the Moon; The Only Jealousy of Emer; Calvary; Sophocles' King Oedipus; The Resurrection; The Words Upon the Windwo-FPane; The King of the Great Clock Tower; The herne's Egg; Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain.
Selected Poems: Selected Poems And Prose
by Charles-Pierre BaudelaireThe 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
by Robert BrowningRobert Browning was one of the greatest of English poets, whose intense and original imagination enabled him to transform any subject he chose - whether everyday or sublime - into startling memorable verse. In his work he brought to life the personalities of a diverse range of characters, and introduced a new immediacy, colloquial energy and psychological complexity to the poetry of his day. This selection brings together verse ranging from early dramatic monologues such as the chilling 'My Last Duchess' and the ribald 'Fra Lippo Lippi', which show his gift for inhabiting the mind of another, to the popular children's poem 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' and many lesser known works. All display his innovative techniques of diction, rhythm and symbol, which transformed Victorian poetry and influenced major poets of the twentieth century such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
Selected Poems
by Robert BurnsThis selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic Auld Lang Syne, the romantic A Red, Red Rose, and the patriotic Scots What Hae. As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range - from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.
Selected Poems
by John BurnsideOver seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. In this Selected Poems we can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and continuity.This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes intimate, resonant, exquisite music.
Selected Poems
by Lord ByronDescribed as 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron was the quintessential Romantic. Flamboyant, charismatic and brilliant, he remains almost as notorious for his life - as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller - as he does for his literary work. Yet he produced some of the most daring and exuberant poetry of the Romantic age, from 'To Caroline' and 'To Woman' to the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, his exotic Eastern tales and the colourful narrative of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that made him famous overnight and gave birth to the idea of the brooding Byronic hero.
Selected Poems
by John DrydenA 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 Tony HarrisonA revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected Poems This indispensable new selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes over sixty poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem 'v.', a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard which caused enormous controversy when it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and is now regarded as one of the key poems of the late twentieth century.This substantially revised and updated edition now also features a generous selection of Harrison's most recent work, including the acclaimed poems he wrote for the Guardian on the Gulf War and then from the front line in the Bosnian War which won him the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2007.Selected Poems is a collection to be savoured by fans of Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Sophie Hannah.'A voracious appetite for language. Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably tender' Harold Pinter'In the front rank of contemporary British poets. Harrison's range is exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp pleasure' Melvyn Bragg'The poem "v." is the most outstanding social poem of the last twenty-five years. Seldom has a British poem of such personal intensity had such universal range' Martin Booth'Poems written in a style which I feel I have all my life been waiting for' Stephen Spender'A poet of great technical accomplishment whose work insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence' Sean O'Brien, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Patrick KavanaghPublished 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: Selected Poems (Macmillan Collector's Library #188)
by John KeatsOver the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should ‘be among the English poets after my death’. This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains youthful verse, such as his earliest known poem ‘Imitation of Spenser’; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820 - including ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Hyperion’ - and later celebrated works such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work, but which illustrate his more earthy, playful side and superb ear for everyday language.
Selected Poems
by Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is often regarded as the unofficial Laureate of the British Empire. Yet his writing reveals a ferociously independent figure at times violently opposed to the dominant political and literary tendencies of his age. Arranged in chronological order, this diverse selection of his poetry shows the development of Kipling's talent, his deepening maturity and the growing sombreness of his poetic vision. Ranging from early, exhilarating celebrations of British expansion overseas, including 'Mandalay' and 'Gunga Din', to the dignified and inspirational 'If -' and the later, deeply moving 'Epitaphs of the War' - inspired by the death of Kipling's only son - it clearly illustrates the scope and originality of his work. It also offers a compelling insight into the Empire both at its peak and during its decline in the early years of the twentieth century.
Selected Poems
by D. H. LawrenceFrom 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 (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Osip MandelshtamJames Greene's acclaimed translations of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, now in an extensively revised and augmented edition.
Selected Poems: The Selected Poems Of Roger Mcgough
by Roger McGoughAn updated selection of Roger McGough's finest, best-loved verse. The complete span of McGough's writing, from the 1960s to the new millennium, is represented. 'McGough's trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away' Ian McMillan, Poetry Review 'McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings' Time Out
Selected Poems: Milton (Routledge English Texts)
by John MiltonThe poems of John Milton (1608-74) have inspired readers for generations and the selection in this new edition spans his entire career, from his earliest works to the magnificent epics of his later life. The devotional ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, his first great poem, anticipates the probing religious questions of Paradise Lost. Works such as ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ consider divisions of loyalties, while ‘A Masque’ (‘Comus’) explores Milton’s great theme of temptation, and the pastoral elegy ‘Lycidas’ contemplates mortality and the meaning of human life. This volume includes considerable selections from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - Milton’s late epics on the Fall of Man and Christ’s temptation in the wilderness - and the complete Samson Agonistes, in which the great hero undergoes a profound crisis of faith in his final hours.
Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Fernando PessoaThe writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.
Selected Poems
by Pierre RonsardRonsard 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 Matthew SweeneyRepresenting the best of ten books and twenty years' work, Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into his strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are coming to the work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift - almost without your noticing - from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising. These are the secret, spiky narratives from the arch story-teller, the mixer of hilarity and menace, the past-master of fractured realism. The world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination.
Selected Poems: Selected Poems (Collins Classics Ser.)
by Rabindranath TagoreThe 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.
Selected Poems
by Alfred Lord Tennyson'Tennyson', wrote T. S. Eliot, 'has the finest ear of any English poet since Milton,' and his verse remains unrivalled in its combination of verbal richness, emotional depth and intellectual engagement. Tennyson drew on classical and medieval legends in poems like 'The Lotos-Eaters' (1832) and 'The Lady of Shalott' (1832) to explore the spiritual tensions of the nineteenth century. In one of the great works of his maturity, 'In Memoriam' (1850) - written after the loss of his dearest friend - Tennyson vividly negotiated contemporary scepticism and the modern sciences of geology and evolution. Similar ground is covered in a dramatically darker mood in 'Maud' (1855), a poignant account of psychological disintegration.
Selected Poems
by William WordsworthOne of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter poems such as 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Tintern Abbey', 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Michael'. Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth's astonishing range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed his work.