Born in 1572 in London England, John Donne is one of the most important and influential of all English poets. The child of Catholic parents at a time when Catholicism was illegal in England, Donne spent much of his life wrestling with his beliefs and trying to find his place in the world. While now regarded as one of the most famous English metaphysical poets and one of exceptional skill and brilliance, Donne published very little poetry during ...
Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” is a prose poem loosely divided into nine parts. In one part of the poem the poet portrays quite transparently his own relationship with French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. The two had a brief alcohol and drug fueled affair which finally came to end when Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist in a drunken rage. “A Season in Hell,” which has been referred to as a pioneering example of modern symbolism, is included ...
Farid ud-Din Attar was a Persian poet, druggist, and social theorist of Sufism, who wrote much of his poetry while treating hundreds of patients a day with his herbal remedies. As a young man he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and sought wisdom during his travels in Egypt, Damascus, and India. His masterpiece, “The Conference of the Birds”, has survived centuries because of its captivating poetic style and its symbolic exploration on the true nature ...
“Song of Myself”, a portion of Walt Whitman’s monumental poetry collection “Leaves of Grass”, is perhaps one of his most loved poems. Whitman is considered by many to be one of the most important and influential American poets of all time and it is the beautiful and moving “Song of Myself” that helped cement his reputation. Exhilarating, fresh, epic, and modern, the poem is at its essence an optimistic and inspirational look at the world. It is ...
"With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion."–Edgar Allan Poe. Containing such famous works as «The Raven», «Lenore», «Annabel Lee», and «To Helen», this complete collection of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe encapsulates the career of one of the best-known and most read American writers. Laden with tones of loneliness, melancholy, and despair, the poetry contained in this volume exerted great influence on the American Romantic and the ...
Set in first part of the 18th century in imperialist Russia, “Eugene Onegin” is a novel in verse, first published serially in 1825, which follows the destiny of its titular character. Eugene is a dandy, whose life involves nothing more than the social whirl of St. Petersburg, with which he has become increasingly bored. When a wealthy uncle dies he inherits a substantial fortune and a country estate where he promptly moves for a change of scener ...
Relatively unknown in his own lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins is the now accredited as the author of some of the finest and most complex poems in the English language. As a Victorian poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, Hopkins pioneered a revolutionary form of meter he termed “sprung rhythm” in his first major work, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” This poem, like most of Hopkins’ work, reflects both his belief in the doctrine that h ...
Born on October 21, 1772 in Devonshire, England, Coleridge was a dreamy and thoughtful boy and not one for sports or rough play. When he was eight his father died and Coleridge was sent away to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school in London where stayed for the remainder of his childhood. In 1795, Coleridge met William Wordsworth and the two poets worked closely together to found the Romantic Movement in English literature. Collected together her ...
Lewis Carroll’s inventive style of poetry is brought to life in this collection of his verse “Jabberwocky and Other Poems.” As most famously illustrated in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Carroll used his mastery of gibberish to form inventive rhymes and lexicons. Many critics have searched for meanings in his poems, but it is believed that Carroll used the nonsensical as a satire of high-poetry. Believing that many writers took themselves t ...
