A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017 -- revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that "combines intellectual authority with addictive readability"...

A collection of poetry, including King John's Christmas, Sneezles, Us Two, Cradle Song, and other poems from the life and imagination of a small child.

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil. --From All Things Can Tempt Me Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats laid the foundations for an Irish literary revival, drawing inspiration from his country's folklore, the occult, and Celtic philosophy. A writer of both poems and plays, he helped found Dublin's...

"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...

In The Divine Comedy, Dante imagines himself as a lost pilgrim who is taken on a guided journey through the three realms of the dead: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. On his travels, he is given the challenge of exploring the darkest recesses of the human soul in an effort to understand the root of evil, sin, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

Collection of poems by Heaney set on an island which has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. His pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of encounters which lead him back into the which which first formed him and then forward to face the crises of the present. The long poem is preceded by a section of meditative lyrics that leads into a group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice...

"Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details - motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic - negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations."--Publisher's...

National Book Award Finalist: The most widely read and enduring interpretation of this ancient Babylonian epic. One of the oldest and most universal stories known in literature, the epic of Gilgamesh presents the grand, timeless themes of love and death, loss and reparations, within the stirring tale of a hero-king and his doomed friend. A National Book Award finalist, Herbert Mason's retelling is at once a triumph of scholarship, a masterpiece of...

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London sometime in the 1340s. The son of a vintner, it is believed that Chaucer came from a fairly well to do family, which enabled him as a young man to come into the service of the Countess of Ulster as the noblewoman's page, a common form of apprenticeship in medieval times. Eventually, it is believed, Chaucer would study law and this most likely afforded him the opportunity to become a member of the royal court of...