The poetry of the medieval Persian sage Rumi combines lyrical beauty with spiritual profundity, a sense of rapture, and acute awareness of human suffering in ways that speak directly to contemporary audiences. Trained in Sufism--a mystic tradition within Islam--Rumi founded the Sufi order known to us as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. Many of Rumi's poems speak of a yearning for ecstatic union with the divine Beloved. But his images bring the sacred and the earthy together in startling ways, describing divine love in vividly human...
The poetry of the medieval Persian sage Rumi combines lyrical beauty with spiritual profundity, a sense of rapture, and acute awareness of human suffe...
A representative selection of verse by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who left in the wake of her personal tragedy a legacy of poems that combine terrifying intensity and dazzling artistry. With their brutally frank self-exposure and emotional immediacy, Plath's poems, from "Lady Lazarus" to "Daddy," have had an enduring influence on contemporary poetry.
A representative selection of verse by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who left in the wake of her personal tragedy a legacy of poems that combine t...
From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.
From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experie...
From backyard to barnyard, from hawks to hummingbirds, from pelicans to peacocks, from Coleridge's albatross to Keats's nightingale to Poe's raven-all manner of feathered beings, the inspiration for poetic flights of fancy through the ages, are gathered together in this delightful volume. Some of the winged treasures: Emily Dickinson on the jay; Gertrude Stein on pigeons; Seamus Heaney on turkeys; Tennyson on the eagle; Spenser on the merry cuckoo; Amy Clampitt on the whippoorwill; Po Chu-i on cranes; John Updike on seagulls; W.S. Merwin on the duck; Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper;...
From backyard to barnyard, from hawks to hummingbirds, from pelicans to peacocks, from Coleridge's albatross to Keats's nightingale to Poe's raven-all...
Christmas is both a holiday and a holy day, and from the start it has been associated with poetry, from the song of the seraphim above the manger to the cherished carols around the punch bowl. This garland of Christmas poems contains not only the ones you would insist on finding here ("A Visit from St. Nicholas," "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," and "The Twelve Days of Christmas" among them) but such equally enchanting though lesser-known Yuletide treasures as Emily Dickinson's "The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman," Anthony Hecht's "Christmas Is Coming," Rudyard Kipling's "Christmas...
Christmas is both a holiday and a holy day, and from the start it has been associated with poetry, from the song of the seraphim above the manger to t...
From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter-a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo's "Love Misinterpreted" to Noel Coward's "Mad About the Boy," from May Swenson's "Symmetrical Companion" to Muriel Rukeyser's "Looking at Each Other," these...
From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter-a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented he...
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafes, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure...
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing ...
In this enchanting and comprehensive collection, the lullabies we all were rocked to sleep with, such as "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and "Hush Little Baby, Don't You Cry," mingle with traditional lullabies from around the world. Here are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms's "Lullaby"; and from Gershwin's "Summertime" to Langston Hughes's lovely lullaby for a "night black baby." Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous-from Walter de la Mare to T. S. Eliot to Lewis...
In this enchanting and comprehensive collection, the lullabies we all were rocked to sleep with, such as "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and "Hush Little Baby, Don'...
New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry-ranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city. All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes's Harlem to James Merrill's Upper East...
New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarna...
It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul. Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.
It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the sp...
