Robert Bethune
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Penned by American philosopher and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience examines the role of the individual's conscience in governmental rule. Thoreau argues that individual citizens must not simply be subject to the decisions of government, but should question every political act to ensure that the system remains a tool for justice and morality-a message that continues to resonate powerfully in modern times.
...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...
Author
Language
English
Description
The name Kelmscott bears a legendary and magical sound among bibliophiles. When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1890, he combined his medieval craft ideals with his skills as one of Britain's most sophisticated, progressive designers. He achieved his goal - the creation of books as beautiful as those of the Middle Ages - by abandoning many of the commercial practices of his day. Morris designed types of great elegance and reintroduced...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Poet Louise Bogan called this 1897 volume “one of the hinges upon which American poetry was able to turn from the sentimentality of the 90's toward modern veracity and psychological truth." The collection, Robinson's second, caught the eye of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, who was instrumental in providing the impoverished poet a much-needed sinecure.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Excerpt: "Fugitive Pieces, Byron's first volume of verse, was privately printed in the autumn of 1806, when Byron was eighteen years of age. Passages in Byron's correspondence indicate that as early as August of that year some of the poems were in the printers' hands and that during the latter part of August and during September the printing was suspended in order that Byron might give his poems an "entire new form." The new form consisted, in part,...
6) Love Songs
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Love Songs (1917) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fourth collection, for which she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Love Songs revels in the mystery of existence itself. From despair to elation, confusion to security, Sara Teasdale captures the many emotions at work in the...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Published in 1921, this book-length poem has been interpreted by some as a ghost story, by others as a tale of revenge, and by others still as the record of a mind reduced to madness. The narrator is an old friend of Avon's, a successful lawyer plagued by a mysterious sense of guilt.
8) Early Poems
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
As in the first two volumes of this series, our interest in these poems is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. In these poems, mostly written in the years just before Byron left England to tour in Europe, it is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself. He is on the brink of the experiences that will lead to his major...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This volume of the Freshwater Seas Lord Byron set consists of 54 poems written during the years 1809-1816. Many were included in various editions of longer works, particularly the 1812 and later editions of Childe Harold; others were published in various newspapers and periodicals, especially the Morning Chronicle; a few were not published until after the author's death, sometimes long after.
The mood is as varied as were the occasions of the compositions....
10) The Satires
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In this, the fourth volume of this series, we hear the poetry in which Byron began to make his mark on the world. Though his major breakthrough with Childe Harold is yet to come, his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was a definite hit in its time, establishing Byron as a known poet and ensuring that his reputation as a literary bad-boy was off to a good start.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was his first major satire and one of his most effective;...
Author
Language
English
Description
This is Carl Sandburg's fourth collection of poetry. His signature style, a rough-and-ready free verse that often transforms into poetic prose, is in full view. Like Whitman before him and like Masters and Frost in his own time, he puts his focus directly on life as he sees it around him, life in the rough-and-tumble Chicago of the early 20th century and life in the American West, at a time when that wild country was finally succumbing to civilization.
Sandburg...
12) Cornhuskers
Author
Language
English
Description
Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the laborer, the hobo, the farmer, the man who works with his hands, the woman who runs a family, or the soldier who goes to war for them. Not for him the Man of the Masses from a left-wing poster, ruddy...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This is the book that made Lord Byron (George Gordon) famous. He was a published and a known poet, but until this book took the English-speaking world by storm in 1812, he was not a famous poet.
Byron was, however, a celebrity. As an aristocrat whose personal life was considered shockingly scandalous - and even today would be good stuff for celebrity gossip magazines - his name was known. His previous work was received out of a mixture of literary...
14) Charnel Rose
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find rest? Aiken's answer is unequivocal: in the ancient, ageless, inhuman, nurturing, commanding, accepting Earth....
15) Turns and Movies
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Conrad Aiken was fascinated throughout his early work with the image of a tempestuous, romantic young man who tears himself away from his wife, his first love, and from a pastoral, peaceful life in a rural setting, to pursue what he hopes will be a richer, fuller, more rewarding life in a great city. In this book, Aiken explores this theme in full, especially in the final long poem, Dust in Starlight, which also forms Part III of his trilogy, Earth...
Author
Language
English
Description
In Charnel Rose, Conrad Aiken takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and emotionally draining search for love, and how some of us turn away from real love when we do find it, preferring instead to re-invent and re-amplify our idealistic vision of passionate perfection. He does this...
Author
Language
English
Description
Rupert Brooke possessed one of the most amazingly sensitive, amazingly sensual poetic minds of the 20th century. Born into a world swiftly sliding into war, torn between highly idealized, romanticized relationships with men and conflicted, often bitter love for women, he expressed his complex emotions and vivid perceptions in verse of startling force, striking sensory intensity, and sometimes sly and biting humor. He left us just under one hundred...
Author
Language
English
Description
This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, as it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city and begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the Broad Shoulders". His poetry is deeply aware of the inner life of the city, from a homeless woman freezing in a doorway to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful. Sandburg, even in his poetry, is in many...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
For those who love Byron's poetry, the value of this work is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. It is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself.
Though a young man, he often writes as if he were old, musing on days gone by, especially his schoolboy life at Harrow. He tries his hand at several genres: classical translation,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
What Spoon River Anthology does for a Midwestern small town, Turns and Movies does for the world of vaudeville. Like Masters, like Aiken: passions, betrayals, secrets, sins, victories, defeats, and inevitable losing struggles against age and death are the stuff of this work. And that's only the first part of the book. The rest of the book consists of a set of four long poems: Discordants, Evensong, Disenchantment and This Dance of Life. In these poems...