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 inc ...
Roman poet, satirist and dramatist Horace was born in southern Italy in 65 b.c.e. Uncommonly for one born to poor parents, Horace studied literature and philosophy in Athens until he became a staff officer in Brutus' army, where he served as a military tribune until the army was defeated in 42 b.c.e. He soon returned to Rome, purchased the post of scribe, and it was here that he began writing verse and struck up a friendship with the poet V ...
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American author whose work extended into politics, poetry, journalism, teaching, music and civil rights activism. He is most famous for his book «The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man», which he published anonymously in 1912. Johnson's works deal with issues of race, particularly slavery, lynching, black rights and interracial relationships. His first collection of poetry, «Fifty Years and Other Poem ...
Between the years of 1797-1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote what are considered his most important poetic works. Among them are the famous «The Rime of the Ancient Mariner», «Kubla Khan», and «Christabel». Also during this period he wrote his much-heralded 'conversation poems' of which includes «This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison», «Frost at Midnight», and «The Nightingale». These great poems can all be found in this volume along with man ...
First published posthumously in 1869, «Paris Spleen» is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. Inspired by Aloysius Bertrand's «Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies a la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot» or «Gaspard of the Night – Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot», Baudelaire remarked that he had read Bertrand's work at least twenty times for starting «Paris Spleen». A commentary on Parisian contemporary ...
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) was an English poet and classical scholar whose work became a major force in turn-of-the-century English poetry. Unlike his contemporaries, Houseman's poetry does not qualify as Romantic, Victorian or Modernist, and is not overly sentimental or optimistic; instead, his deeply pessimistic and ironic poetry, written clearly and succinctly, earned Housman notoriety as one of the foremost classicists of his tim ...
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 t ...
"Goblin Market and Other Poems" is a collection of poetic tales by Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. It was her first published work and it received critical acclaim. The poem «Goblin Market» is a story about two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who live alone near a market that is run by goblins. Each night, the goblins call out to the girls to try their wares, but the girls are wary of their offers. One night, Laura cannot resist temptation, a ...
Master of gibberish Lewis Carroll brings his inventive style of writing to life once more in the collection «Jabberwocky and Other Poems.» Though most famous for his creation of Wonderland and Alice's fall into the uncanny world of the nonsensical, Carroll used his wordsmithing ability to form inventive rhymes and lexicons in this collection. Words like «bandersnatch,» «chortled,» «tulgey,» and even «Jabberwocky» are inventions of Carroll&a ...