When Second World War Spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee penned his poem 'High Flight', little did he know that his words would inspire legions of aspiring aviators who had a similar wish to fly their 'eager craft through footless halls of air'.
A masterpiece of Arabic love poetry in a new and complete English translationThe Translator of Desires, a collection of sixty-one love poems, is the lyric masterwork of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240 CE), one of the most influential writers of classical Arabic and Islamic civilization.
In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna.
In this exciting interpretation of the Odyssey, the late renowned scholar Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense.
Heaven in Ordinary is like a love affair with poetry that engages with religious questions, for good or ill, concerned with five poets who are haunted by God.
Heaven in Ordinary is like a love affair with poetry that engages with religious questions, for good or ill, concerned with five poets who are haunted by God.
Evelyn Waugh's first book: a portrait of one of the greatest artists of the nienteenth century, from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth'Biography, as books about the dead are capriciously catalogued, is still very much in the mode'This is a sparkling account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tragic and mysterious life, telling the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century.
A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographerThe most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence.
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
Drawn from the acclaimed New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles in this concise new reference book provide a complete survey of the poetic history and practice in every major national literature or cultural tradition in the world.
Vladimir Nabokov's famous and brilliant commentary on Pushkin's Eugene OneginWhen Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in 1964, the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokov's witty and exhaustive commentary.
Taking seriously Guillaume Apollinaire's wager that twentieth-century poets would one day "e;mechanize"e; poetry as modern industry has mechanized the world, Carrie Noland explores poetic attempts to redefine the relationship between subjective expression and mechanical reproduction, high art and the world of things.
The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeRain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "e;a master of musicality and enlightening allusions.
An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "e;a seduction by way of small astonishments"e;Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "e;an original in Eliot's sense of the word.
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
This edition gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his 'conscientious and often amusingly self-conscious tenure' (TLS) as Oxford University Professor of Poetry.
Erica Wagner provides a comprehensive guide to the poems that must constitute one of the most extraordinary and powerful volumes published in the last century.
Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's.
For the second half of his long life, Christopher Logue (1926-2011) - political rebel, inventor of the poster poem, pioneer of poetry and jazz - was at work on a very different project: a rewriting of Homer's Iliad.
The appearance of Philip Larkin's second prose collection - reviews and critical assessments of writers and writing; pieces on jazz, mostly uncollected; some long, revealing and often highly entertaining interviews given on various occasions - was a considerable literary event.
Ian Hamilton's last book, published posthumously in 2002, is a typically brilliant revisiting of the concept of Samuel Johnson's classic Lives of the English Poets, wherein Hamilton considers 45 deceased poets of the twentieth century, offering his personal estimation of what claims they will have on posterity and 'against oblivion.
The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur.
Arthur Seymour John Tessimond - Jack to his family, John in later life - was born in Birkenhead in 1902 and made his living as an advertising copywriter, but his true writing life was in poetry, three volumes of which he published in his lifetime: The Walls of Glass (1934), Voices in a Giant City (1947), and Selection (1958).
'The most remarkable phenomenon of the English poetic scene during the last ten years or so has been the advent, or perhaps I should say the irruption, of Gavin Ewart' wrote Philip Larkin.
Lunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone.
