Relatively unknown in his own lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins is the now accredited as the author of some of the finest and most complex poems in the English language. As a Victorian poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, Hopkins pioneered a revolutionary form of meter he termed "sprung rhythm" in his first major work, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." This poem, like most of Hopkins' work, reflects both his belief in the doctrine that human...

"In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature." --Publisher description.

This collection includes Oscar Wilde's only novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," as well as all his stories, plays, and poems.

John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the 'Peasant Poet' he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth's for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: 'I feel a beautiful providence ever about me,' Clare wrote. But his life was a long struggle against poverty and mental collapse. Some of his finest...

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father's farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

"First published in 1886, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, the work of a poet who had abandoned poetry before the age of twenty-one, changed the language of poetry. Hallucinatory and feverishly hermetic, it is an acknowledged masterpiece of world literature, still unrivaled for its haunting blend of sensuous detail and otherworldly astonishment. In Ashbery's translation of this notoriously elusive text, the acclaimed poet and translator lends his inimitable...

This biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, the author reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through...