Alfred Edward Housman was an English poet and classical scholar whose work became a major force in turn of the century English poetry. Unlike his contemporaries, Housman’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 recognition as one of the foremost classicists of his time. His best-kno ...
Robert Service dreamed of a life of adventure and freedom to live and write as he wanted, surrounded by nature and the beauty of the world. Born in Lancashire, England, he developed an urge early on to travel abroad, and set his sights on the rough and tumble “wild west” of Canada. Part journalist and part storyteller, he ventured up and down the west coast of the United States and wrote romantic stories of cowboys, gold prospectors, and charact ...
One of Hilaire Belloc’s most famous works, “Cautionary Tales for Children” satirizes a genre of admonitory children’s literature popular in England in the 19th century. The seven stories contained in this work are macabre parodies of childhood lessons, and will entertain more sophisticated readers who can appreciate these tales of disproportionate punishment. Presented in a classic picture book style, Belloc has captured the foibles of children ...
Initially conceived after reading the works of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was known for his early studies of Native American culture, “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is an epic poem based on the legends of the Ojibwa Indians of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Written in 1855 in trochaic tetrameter, the tale is set in the picturesque Pictured Rocks area along the south shore of Lake Superior. The lyrical descriptions of ...
First published in English in 1912, “Gitanjali”, or “Song Offerings”, is a collection of poems translated by the author, Rabindranath Tagore, from the original Bengali. It contains over 100 inspirational poems by India’s greatest poet and earned Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore, known as the “Bard of Bengal”, was born in 1861 to a wealthy family and started writing poetry as a child and began publishing critically acclaimed ...
“The New Life” or “La Vita Nuova” is the first of two collections of verse and prose written by the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. Since the Middle Ages, Dante has been cherished as the “Supreme Poet” of Italy, and is most widely recognized for his allegorical masterpiece “The Divine Comedy”. “The New Life” contains works written over a period of ten years, from before 1283 to roughly 1293, and is the semi-autobiographical account of Dante’s lif ...
Written between 1845 and 1846 and first published in 1850, “Sonnets from the Portuguese” is a series of love poems written by the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, the famous English poet and playwright, Robert Browning, which was critically acclaimed and instantly popular upon its publication and has remained so to this day. Referring to her olive-skinned complexion, Robert called his wife “his little Portuguese”. It is fr ...
In this representative collection of Christina Rossetti’s poems we find a vast array of narrative tales, love lyrics, sonnets, hymns, ballads, and sprightly verses for children. Ranked among the finest English poets of the nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti is a widely read, though not widely imitated poet, recognized for her devotional poetry, influenced by the religious conservatism and asceticism of the Church of England. This collection ...
“Chicago Poems” is an early collection of poems by American writer, poet, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg. Published in 1916 and his first by a mainstream publisher, this collection was a critical success and began Sandburg’s career as a notable writer. Sandburg was a champion of an American form of social realism that celebrated American people, industry, and agriculture. He expressed this sentiment in an easy-to-read and pla ...
