Poetry

Twas the Night before Christmas

"A Visit from St. Nicholas", also known as "The Night Before Christmas" and "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who acknowledged authorship. An argument has been made that it was actually written by Henry Livingston, Jr., a claim that has been hotly disputed.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the oldest. It is believed to have been composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. . The quarto ends with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal.

Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete

A complete collection of Emily Dickinson's work offers poetry lovers a full view of her interior life and literary genius

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman . Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The Iliad

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.

The Real Mother Goose

Blanche Fisher Wright is children's books illustrator, active in the 1910s. She is best known as being the illustrator of The Real Mother Goose, originally published in 1916.

A Child's Garden of Verses

A Child's Garden of Verses is a collection of poetry for children by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The collection first appeared in 1885 under the title Penny Whistles, but has been reprinted many times, often in illustrated versions. It contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics "Foreign Children," "The Lamplighter," "The Land of Counterpane," "Bed in Summer," "My Shadow" and "The Swing."

The Raven

"The Raven" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton . It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. It is considered by critics to be Milton's "major work", and the work helped to solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of his time.

The Waste Land

"The Waste Land" is a long poem written by T.S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as "one of the most important poems of the 20th century" and a central text in Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the U.K. in the October issue of The Criterion and in the U.S. in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih".

Songs of Innocence and Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall."

Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play in two parts: Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil and Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil . Although rarely staged in its entirety, it is the play with the largest audience numbers on German-language stages. Faust is Goethe's most famous work and considered by many to be one of the greatest works of German literature.

The Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám , a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts per line, hence the word rubáiyát , meaning "quatrains".

The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Today, Edgar Allan Poe is best remembered as a master of suspense and an early innovator in the genre of detective fiction, but Poe's first literary ambition was to be known as a poet. This stellar collection brings together some of his most accomplished works, including "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells."

Nonsense Books

Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense works, which use real and invented English words.

A Boy's Will

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetical works.

The Younger Edda

The Prose Edda is one of two Old Norse compilations made in Iceland in the early 13th century. Together they comprise the major store of pagan Scandinavian mythology. The Prose Edda was the work of Snorri Sturluson who planned it as a textbook for writers of skaldic poetry, prefaced by a section on the Norse cosmogony, pantheon and myths. It begins with a euhemerized Prologue followed by three distinct books: Gylfaginning , Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal . Seven manuscripts, dating from around 1300 to around 1600, have independent textual value. The purpose of the collection was to enable Icelandic poets and readers to understand the subtleties of alliterative verse, and to grasp the meaning behind the many kenningar that were used in skaldic poetry.

Cautionary Tales for Children

Cautionary Tales for Children: Designed for the Admonition of Children between the ages of eight and fourteen years is a 1907 children's book written by Hilaire Belloc. It is a parody of the cautionary tales that were popular in the 19th century. The work is in the public domain in the United States.

Poems

Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is perhaps best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.

The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated

The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

On the Nature of Things

De rerum natura is a 1st-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, "chance", and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.

The Poetics of Aristotle

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" . He examines its "first principles" and identifies its genres and basic elements. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, Marvin Carlson explains, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."

Don Juan

Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire". Modern critics generally consider it Byron's masterpiece, with a total of more than 16,000 lines of verse.

Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I

Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.

The Song of Roland

This, the first great French heroic poem, is probably the earliest of the truly national poems of the modern world.

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures

One of the most popular and influential children's book ever written, this time-honored tale — sure to produce lots of giggles — describes the gruesome consequences that befall children who torment animals, play with matches, suck their thumbs, refuse to eat, and fidget at meals. A collector's item, written in rhyming couplets and illustrated by the author.

A Shropshire Lad

A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman . Some of the better-known poems in the book are "To an Athlete Dying Young", "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" and "When I Was One-and-Twenty".

Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.

The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany in May 1712 in two cantos , but then revised, expanded and reissued under Pope's name on 2 March 1714, in a much-expanded 5-canto version . The final form was available in 1717 with the addition of Clarissa's speech on good humour.

Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of MY LITERARY LIFE and OPINIONS, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volumes.

Poems

Selected from the French writer's vast collection of verse, this bilingual collection introduces readers to the breadth of Hugo's poetic vision, which covered religion, love, politics, and other incisive themes.

Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica

Hesiod was a Greek poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought , archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.

Chamber Music

Chamber Music is a collection of poems by James Joyce, published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907. The collection originally comprised thirty-four love poems, but two further poems were added before publication .

An Essay on Man

An Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734. It is a rationalistic effort to use philosophy in order to "vindicate the ways of God to man" , a variation of John Milton's claim in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, that he will "justify the ways of God to men" . It is concerned with the natural order God has decreed for man. Because man cannot know God's purposes, he cannot complain about his position in the Great Chain of Being and must accept that "Whatever IS, is RIGHT" , a theme that was satirized by Voltaire in Candide . More than any other work, it popularized optimistic philosophy throughout England and the rest of Europe.