An important and often-quoted literary figure, the English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote some of the most beautiful and voluptuous poetry in the English language. Like Emily Dickinson, she lived in self-imposed isolation, writing of God and lost love with a sensuality and passion that seemed to emanate from the soul.
This edition of 53 works combines a number of her best-known sonnets, ballads, and shorter lyrics with her long masterpiece, the narrative fable Goblin Market. A haunting fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market was once labeled a children's poem, yet...

First performed about 1805, King Lear is one of the most relentlessly bleak of Shakespeare's tragedies. Probably written between Othello and Macbeth, when the playwright was at the peak of his tragic power, Lear's themes of filial ingratitude, injustice, and the meaninglessness of life in a seemingly indifferent universe are explored with unsurpassed power and depth.
The plot concerns a monarch betrayed by his daughters, robbed of his kingdom, descending into madness. Greed, treachery, and cruelty are rife and the denouement of the play is both brutal and...

One of the most durable myths in Western culture, the story of Faust tells of a learned German doctor who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Early enactments of Faust's damnation were often the raffish fare of clowns and low comedians. But the young Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) recognized in the story of Faust's temptation and fall the elements of tragedy.
In his epic treatment of the Faust legend, Marlowe retains much of the rich phantasmagoria of its origins. There are florid visions of an enraged Lucifer, dueling angels, the...

Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron's.
"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on...

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, in the London of the late 1300s, a band of men and women from all walks of life have gathered to begin a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. To relieve the tedium of the journey, the host of the inn proposes that each of the pilgrims tell a favorite story, promising that the best storyteller will be treated to a fi ne dinner on the group's return to Southwark.
So begins one of the earliest masterpieces of English literature, a collection of stories as much prized for the portraits of its story tellers as for the stories they tell --...

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and ... learn what it had to teach." Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond -- on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson -- outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed, built fences, surveyed, and wrote in his journal.
One product of his two-year sojourn was this book -- a great classic of American...