In response to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for the United States to have its own unique poet, Walt Whitman rose to the challenge to create what would ultimately be his most profound work. Taking its title from the colloquial term «grass», meaning a work of minor value, Whitman's «Leaves of Grass» is anything but that. Over his lifetime Whitman would continue to expand and revise his most famous book up until his death in 1892. Here in t ...
Composed by Alfred Tennyson as a requiem for his college friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1833, «In Memoriam A. H. H.» is a poem written over a seventeen year period and completed in 1849. Widely considered as one of the greatest poems of the Victorian era it is a richly lyrical work which meditates on the search for hope in the wake of a great loss. The length of this work and the period of time in which ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known as being a leader of the transcendentalist movement, a philosophy that emerged in the mid 19th century in New England. Transcendentalism was a general protest against established society and culture at the time that sought an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established r ...
Alfred Tennyson is one of the foremost poets of Victorian England and is studied today for his deeply intellectual and classic style. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to his death in 1892. He was a favorite of Queen Victoria, and she even made him a baron out of respect for him and his works. Many of his poems focus on classical Greek, Roman, and Medieval mythology. One such poem is the Arthurian-inspired ballad «The Lady ...
This uncompleted suite of poems by French poet Arthur Rimbaud was first published serially in the Paris literary review magazine «La Vogue.» The magazine published part of «Illuminations» from May to June 1886. Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's lover, suggested the publication of these poems, written between 1873 and 1875, in book form. All forty-two of the poems generally considered as part of «Illuminations» are collected together here in this edi ...
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright. Tagore modernized Bengali art and literature by rejecting classical forms, and produced strongly poetic and spiritual works. In addition to his original writings, Tagore's translations have been revered throughout both the Eastern and Western worlds, earning him the respect ...
John Milton, the 17th century English poet author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England is of course known best for his famous epic poem «Paradise Lost» which retells the biblical story of «The Fall of Man» and how Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan and ultimately expelled from the Garden of Eden. «Paradise Lost» is included in this volume of «The Complete Poems of John Milton» along with its sequel «Paradise Regained» an ...
The simple and beautiful eloquence of William Blake's poetry is exemplified here in «Songs of Innocence and of Experience.» This collection of forty-six poems is actually two volumes in one. After first completing and publishing «Songs of Innocence» in 1789 Blake would, some five years later, add «Songs of Experience» to the volume in an effort to show «the two contrary states of the human soul.» ...
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was the oldest of 10 children being the successor to the patriarchal position of his family. From his earliest years, Ludovico was interested in poetry, but was obliged by his father, a commander of the Reggio Emilia citadel, to study law. In 1517, he served under the cardinal's brother, Alfonso, duke of Ferrara, and it was then that he began writing his masterpiece and romance epic «Orlando Furioso». The earlie ...
