Bringing together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends, Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant Metamorphoses describes a magical world in which men and women are transformed - often by love - into flowers, trees, animals, stones and stars.
Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel in blank verse, tells the story of the making of a woman poet, exploring 'the woman question', art and its relation to politics and social oppression.
This landmark new collection brings together the best of the poetry of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and author of Lolita and Pale Fire.
Franceso Petrarch (1304-1374), creator of the sonnet form, remained for more than three hundred years the most influential poet in Europe, his works more widely read than even those of Dante.
At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a jovial group of pilgrims assembles, including an unscrupulous Pardoner, a noble-minded Knight, a ribald Miller, the lusty Wife of Bath, and Chaucer himself.
One of the most versatile of Roman poets, Catullus wrote verse of an almost unparalleled diversity and stylistic agility, from the brevity of the epigram to the sustained elegance of the elegy.
This magical and poignant evocation of coming of age in the countryside describes lovers in secluded lanes, cricket and church bells, cherry trees hung with snow and woods full of bluebells.
The poems of John Milton (1608-74) have inspired readers for generations and the selection in this new edition spans his entire career, from his earliest works to the magnificent epics of his later life.
'We hear the voice of a great and enduring poet in our ear again' Carol Ann Duffy 'Go, girls, pursue the violet Muses' brightGifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns'By turns subversive, erotic and poignant, Sappho is one of the most versatile and exquisite poets in Classical literature.
Endpoint opens with a series of connected poems which were written on the occasions of Updike's recent birthdays and culminate in his confrontation with his final illness.
Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy.
This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes.
Keats is one of the major figures in the second generation of Romantic Poets and was considered by Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century.
Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian.
Robert Browning was one of the greatest of English poets, whose intense and original imagination enabled him to transform any subject he chose - whether everyday or sublime - into startling memorable verse.
'An endless moral maze, introducing literature's first Romantic, Satan' John CareyIn his epic poem Paradise Lost Milton conjured up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time.
Tennyson had a life-long interest in the legend of King Arthur and after the huge success of his poem 'Morte d'Arthur' he built on the theme with this series of twelve poems, written in two periods of intense creativity over nearly twenty years.
In Purgatorio Dante, having described his journey into Hell, narrates his ascent of Mount Purgatory with Virgil, as he encounters penitents who toil through physical agonies, starvation and flames to assuage their earthly vices.
In 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work which defined him as one of America's most influential voices, and which he added to throughout his life.
From early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) the poems of D.
Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins.
No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy.
In Paradise, having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory, Dante ascends to Heaven, continuing his soul's search for God, guided by his beloved Beatrice.
The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), lived a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three - described by Samuel Johnson as having 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness'.
One of the great romances of the Middle Ages, Tristan, written in the early thirteenth century, is based on a medieval love story of grand passion and deceit.
'It was with aweThat I beheldFresh leaves, green leaves,Bright in the sun'When the Japanese haiku master Basho composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was an ardent student of Zen Buddhism, setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment.
One of the earliest extant versions of the Tristan and Yseut story, Beroul's French manuscript of The Romance of Tristan dates back to the middle of the twelfth century.
