This new edition focuses on the Sonnets as poetry - sometimes strikingly individual poems, but often subtly interlinked in thematic, imagistic and other groupings. Gwynne Evans and Anthony Hecht also address the many questions that cast a veil of mystery over the genesis of the Sonnets: to what extent are they autobiographical? What is the nature of the 'love', strongly expressed, between the 'poet', the 'youth' and the 'Dark Lady'? Can they, apart...

Presents an introduction to the life and works of eighteenth-century English poet William Wordsworth, and features a selection of his poems, each with a brief introduction and definitions of difficult words and terms.

"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

Begun in a weekly paper in 1881, Bierce's "dictionary" of barbed definitions includes cynical epigrams, maxims, essays, and verses that illustrate the irreverent humor of the nineteenth-century satirist as he lampoons cherished American traditions.

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (the pen name of author Mary Ann Evans), published in 1860. The novel was originally published in three parts. It was very successful and was adapted into a film as early as 1937. It was Eliot's second novel and one of her most successful of all time. The novel tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow from children to young adults in the small rural town of St. Ogg's, England....

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, "essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages" (The Guardian) The effortless virtuosity, drama, and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her much admired among contemporary poets. Rapture is a book-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony. But what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is Duffy's refusal to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations-infatuation,...

"A collection of sonnets from one of Scotland's most celebrated poets"--

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment,...

A collection of poems reflecting the experiences of a little English boy growing up in the early part of the twentieth century.

"This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature.... Based on the tenets of Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things asserts that matter is composed of an infinite number of small particles; that even the soul, like the body, is made up of these atoms and dissolves painlessly after death; that there is no afterlife and therefore no cause for fear; and that the universe operates without...