Showing results for "The Poets" in Collections & Anthologies

From listening to his grandmother recite epic poems from memory to curling up in bed while his father read funny verses, award-winning actor John Lithgow grew up with poetry. Ever since, John has been an enthusiastic seeker of poetic experience, whether reading, reciting, or listening to great...

How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, wisdom and humour of their poetry? From the genius of the Ancient Greeks through to the love poetry and metaphysics of the Renaissance, through to the New York poets of the 20th century, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age.

The dreaming spires of Oxford may be one of the great educational establishments of the Centuries. But it is also a place where the Nation’s young learn much more. Within its walls, courtyards and cloisters these 10 Poets mused and illuminated on the beauty of poetry with eager yet tender words.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today's often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In literature the ambition is much narrower. In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published. And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading. Obviously for most of humanity's time people couldn't read and texts couldn't be published in any great number.

The Irish are known the world over as friendly and engaging talkers with a word here and a few words there to each and every soul they meet. Their poets dazzle with talent and verse that few other nations dare compete with. What follows demonstrates why.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.

This collection includes favorite English-language poems by 178 favorite authors, beginning with Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke in Elizabethan times, and ending with T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore in the twentieth century. Cavaliers and Puritans, a famous king and a pilloried criminal, soulful lovers and sharp-witted satirists, Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Marvell, David Garrick and Rabindranath Tagore, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Christina Rossetti—all are here, in one constantly changing kaleidoscope of brilliant verse.

Sixty-nine poems by six of the most admired women Romantic writers—English, Scottish, Irish, and American: Dorothy Wordsworth (William Wordsworth’s sister), Joanna Baillie, Eliza Townsend, Mary Tighe, Sara Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter), and Caroline Bowles Southey. Each in her own way, they all broke with the poetic conventions of the past, writing in ordinary language about ordinary people, and approaching the traditional subjects of poetry with fresh eyes. Comedy and tragedy, love and hatred, life and death, oppression and freedom—they’re all here.

The poets whose work is included in this collection were contemporaries of John Milton and were active during the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, as well as the intervening period of the Commonwealth. While Milton expressed his disdain for these light-hearted lyrics, they display a compelling and ingenious charm which has been rarely equalled.

In this volume we listen to the world through the eyes and words of the English Romantics. This very special poetical period is filled with the loving and tender verse of poets who still beguile us all with their beauty.

In 1892, Alfred Tennyson, the official Poet Laureate of Great Britain, died. According to custom, a new Laureate now had to be chosen by the Prime Minister. But on this occasion, uniquely, there was a problem. Many different candidates for the position were suggested, but for several years, none were chosen. In this recording, we listen to selected poems by Tennyson himself and by ten writers nominated to succeed him.

For centuries England has always had a leading and admired reputation for its poets and poetry. In this volume we explore those born in the East Midlands who created such revered, enduring and respected verse.

The United States may be far younger than many nations on Earth, yet its tumultuous history has reaped a harvest of poets and poetry of very fine calibre. In this volume we explore the verse of Massachusetts.

In this volume we gather together those 17th Century poets and their poems which took poetry in a different but very revealing direction, with their artistry and verse.

Leviathans stride the poetic stage, known to us all and revered by many. Their verse is at once familiar and yet constantly reveals new layers and depths, new ways of thinking and assembling words to reveal new truths, new feelings and above all new poetry.

For centuries England has always had a leading and admired reputation for its poets and poetry. In this volume we explore those born in the North-West who created such revered, enduring and respected verse.

For centuries England has always had a leading and admired reputation for its poets and poetry. In this volume we explore those born in the East of England who created such revered, enduring and respected verse.

Each and every one of us has attempted the feat—to express our feelings on love is one of the joys, or heartaches, of life. In this volume 10 poets add their immortal words on love. Some are tender, some are strident, some beguile with unknown words and play but always, always in tones of love. Genius in every name.