Scotsman and poet Robert Burns was born in 1796. His family didn’t have much in terms of money, but Burns was still optimistic about life and love. His first poems were songs written to his many lovers, though those were not received well by the mistresses. In 1786, Burns’ first anthology “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect” was released. It contained some of his best works, such as “The Twa Dogs” and “To a Mouse, On Turning Up Her Nest With ...
A visionary of eighteen-century English society, William Blake produced a vast collection of poetry, mythology, satires, political pieces, and prophetic works, in addition to his famous etchings and engravings. Although largely unknown during his own lifetime and often rejected as a madman for claims of hearing voices and later having visions, Blake has achieved enduring fame for his innovative and extraordinarily imaginative work and is widely ...
First published in 1923, “Spring and All” is the groundbreaking volume of poetry by the modernist and imagist American poet William Carlos Williams. Williams, born in New Jersey in 1883, worked as a doctor for most of his life while spending his free time writing plays, short stories, novels, essays, and poetry. Containing some of Williams’s best-known poetry, the volume alternates between prose and free verse. Williams’s prose has been describe ...
The cycle of 55 sonnets that comprise Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” were written in a period of three weeks during 1922, a time which the poet himself described as a “savage creative storm.” Inspired by the death of his daughter’s friend, Wera Knoop, Rilke commenced to the production of “Sonnets to Orpheus”, a work filled with mythological and biblical allusions. During the same burst of creative energy he set to working on the compl ...
A cycle of twelve narrative poems, “Idylls of the King” is Alfred Tennyson’s classic 19th century retelling of Arthurian legend. Linked by their common focus, these poems relate the stories of King Arthur’s ascent to power, quest to create a perfect kingdom, and his eventual defeat. Included in this epic work are the stories of Arthur’s love for Guinevere, their marriage, and her betrayal. Much of the work is also devoted to the exploits of the ...
Considered to be one of the most difficult poems in the history of the English language, “The Faerie Queen” by Edmund Spenser is a marvelous epic poem depicting the virtues of the legendary King Arthur and his knights in a mythical place called Faerieland. Spenser based his interpretation of the virtues on those named by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Each one of the books discusses a different hero who displays one of these virtues; however, thi ...
First published in 1923, “New Hampshire” by famed American poet Robert Frost, is one of the most beautiful and famous collection of poems in American literature. The book contains many of Frost’s most well-known and beloved poems, such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, “Fire and Ice”, and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”. Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for “New Hampshire” and he woul ...
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 se ...
In the year 778 A.D., Charles the Great, King of the Franks, returned from a military expedition into Spain, whither he had been led by opportunities offered through dissensions among the Saracens who then dominated that country. On the 15th of August, while his army was marching through the passes of the Pyrenees, his rear-guard was attacked and annihilated by the Basque inhabitants of the mountains, in the valley of Roncesvaux. About this disa ...
