Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott. Whether they are the works of oblique avant-gardists like John Ashbery or direct, populist poets like Allen Ginsberg, all of the selections are accompanied by extensive introductions and footnotes, making the great poetry of the period fully accessible to readers for the first time.
Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume XLI is the second of three volumes that ambitiously survey half a milliennium of poetry in the English language. More than 300 works by 60 authors in this volume alone span the 18th and 19th centuries, and include: [ George Sewell: "The Dying Man in His Garden" [ Alison Rutherford Cockburn: "The Flowers of the Forest" [ Henry Fielding: "A Hunting Song" [ Oliver Goldsmith: "The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society" [ Richard Brinsley Sheridan: "Drinking Song" [ Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne: "The Auld House" [ William Blake: "The Tiger" [ William Wordsworth: "Nature and the Poet" [ Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [ Sir Walter Scott: "To a Lock of Hair" [ Thomas Campbell: "The Soldier's Dream" [ George Gordon, Lord Byron: "She Walks in Beauty" [ Percy Bysshe Shelley: "To a Skylark" [ John Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" [ Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Sonnets" [ and much more.
Originally published in 1972. This important work of Chaucerian scholarship deals with two aspects of the poet and his work - his individual achievement and his place in history - and demonstrates that in both these senses Chaucer is a maker of English poetry. The author explores Chaucer’s narrative art. The book includes an examination of the puzzling question of narrative structure in the Canterbury Tales and of the nature of Chaucerian comedy in these works. The author surveys the major themes of the poems: Fortune and free will, marriage, and the nobleness of man. In the final chapter she treats of the meaning of Chaucer’s art for his successors. Throughout the work, Miss Kean deals extensively with the sources which Chaucer used for the writing of his poems, in a way which directs light on the more difficult aspects of his art.
This text features 28 essays written by important international scholars on the major poems of the English Renaissance. It offers scholarship on subjects ranging from the invention of English verse, Petrarchism, pastoral, elegy, and satire, to women's religious verse, the place of homoeroticism and Cavalier poetry.