Francis Thompson, an English poet and author, is best known for his poem "Hound of Heaven," included in this selection of his poems. After submitting some poems to the magazine "Merrie England," the editors, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, became his benefactors and published his first volume, "Poems." Wilfrid Meynell selected these poems form Thompson's works and provides an enlightening biographical sketch. At the end of this volume are a selection of tributes to Thompson ranging from newspaper reviews to an appreciation from G.K Chesterton.
An 1883 selection of Lewis Carroll's satirical and comic verse. The collection ranges from the well-known and well-loved The Hunting Of The Snark, to lesser-known gems such as Phantasmagoria, a tale of the difficulties encountered by an inexperienced phantom in his first domestic haunting, and Hiawatha’s Photographing, a brilliant satire of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. (Michael Maggs)
This is a collection of poems by James Elroy Flecker.
Sarojini Naidu was a remarkable woman. Known as the Nightingale of India, she started writing at the age of thirteen and throughout her life composed several volumes of poetry, writing many poems which are still famous to this day.
As well as being a poet, Naidu was an activist and politician, campaigning for Indian independence and became the first Indian woman to attain the post of President of the Indian National Congress.
This volume contains the beautiful 'Indian Love-Song', as well as many other moving verses. All of them give insight into the heart and mind of this hugely important and influential woman.The poems are split into three categories: Folk Songs, Songs for Music and Poems.
Though later known for his essays and novels, Aldous Huxley started his writing career as a poet. Published in 1918, The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third compilation of poetry.
The volume begins with "The Defeat of Youth", a sequence of twenty-two sonnets that explores irreconcilability of the ideal and the disappointing reality. Jerome Meckier called it “the century’s most successful sonnet sequence, better than Auden’s or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s.” In the rest of the volume, Huxley continues to explore themes started in The Burning Wheel, his first volume of poetry, including vision, blindness, and other contrasts.
The volume concludes with two English translations by Huxley of two French poems: Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune" and Arthur Rimbaud’s (1871) poem “Les Chercheuses de poux,” translated as “The Louse Hunters.” Summary by Mary Kay.
Gerald William Bullett was a British man of letters. He was known as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, critic and poet. He wrote both supernatural fiction and some children's literature. "Mice & Other Poems" is one of a series of small volumes of poetry published after WWI mostly by graduates of the University of Cambridge. The doyen of "Cambridge English", Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, had this to say about the series: "That since the War, young men in extraordinary numbers have taken to expressing themselves in verse is a plain fact, not to be denied: that they choose, as often as not, to express themselves in 'numbers' extraordinary to us can as hardly be contested. But the point is, they have a crowding impulse to say something; and to say it with the emotional seriousness proper to Poetry. For my part, I love the discipline of verse: but I love the impulse better. Time will soften—I hope not too soon, lest it sugar down and sentimentalise—a certain bitterness of resentment observable in this booklet and its next followers: but, as nothing in verse is nobler than true tradition, anything is more hopeful than convention."
A collection of poetry by Hilaire Belloc ranging from religious verses to drinking songs.
Jane Wilde, the mother of Oscar Wilde, was an Irish poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza. She was politically active as an Irish nationalist, a passion which may be seen in her writing. Poems is a collection of her poetic works.
A collection of dark and humorous verse from "Col D. Streamer". This collection includes poems from The Baby's Baedeker, Perverted Proverbs, and Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes.
Born in 1878, Thomas published his first book when he was 18. Having married while still at university, he supported his family by writing articles and books, some in the form of what we might call slow travel writing, compiled on walks throughout England and Wales. He came to poetry late, encouraged by Robert Frost, and wrote 144 poems between 1914, and 1917 when he was killed, two years after enlisting, and shortly after arriving in France.
His poetic life coincided with WW1, and though not a war poet, his is the poetry of loss, of life as it would never be again. What is powerful to the English imagination is his depiction of the fragility of the English countryside. This is inseparable from his deep understanding of the longings and regrets of those who would die. Transience and mortality are at the heart of his work. This is true in one of the country’s favourite poems, to be found on this recording: Adlestrop. He is important to other poets in that, at his best, his poetry is quietly, sometimes coldly, conversational, with a slow beat that takes us with him as he thinks through from line to line, and wraps us in his vision of life and the natural world.
To those unacquainted with Tennyson's conscientious methods, it may seem strange that a volume of 160 pages is necessary to contain those poems written and published by him during his active literary career, and ultimately rejected as unsatisfactory. Of this considerable body of verse, a great part was written, not in youth or old age, but while Tennyson's powers were at their greatest. Whatever reasons may once have existed for suppressing the poems that follow, the student of English literature is entitled to demand that the whole body of Tennyson's work should now be open, without restriction or impediment, to the critical study to which the works of his compeers are subjected.
This is a collection of poems by Vera M. Brittain, an Englishwoman, who served in World War I as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). She worked as a nurse during the war. These poems are based on her wartime experiences.
A collection of poetry in the whimsical style of Edith Nesbit, author of "The Five Children and It" and "The Railway Children". These poems are primarily for adults, although a few are written for her daughters. The majority are philosophical reflections on Edith Nesbit's life as a wife and mother, and theological reflections on Christianity and faith, the nature of the world, life and death.
George Santayana was born in Spain, educated in Boston and taught at Harvard before returning to Europe to spend the last forty years of his life writing. He is primarily known as a philosopher, his five-volume The Life of Reason being his magnus opus. But he also wrote a successful novel, The Last Puritan, as well as plays, essays and poetry. During his time at Harvard he influenced many of his student including T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
Of these poems which he chose to collect together in this volume he says, "What I felt when I composed those verses could not have been rendered in any other form. Their sincerity is absolute, not only in respect to the thought which might be abstracted from them and expressed in prose, but also in respect to the aura of literary and religious associations which envelops them. . . . In one sense I think that my verses, mental and thin as their texture may be, represent a true inspiration, a true docility. . . . For as to the subject of these poems, it is simply my philosophy in the making." (From the Preface)
The collection consists of fifty sonnets, a few odes an a selection of miscellaneous poems. The volume concludes with as essay about Santayana by poet and literary critic Edmund Gosse who says of Santayana's poetry, "Only in solitude can soliloquies be appreciated, and Mr. Santayana is not an author for loud streets..." Summary by Larry Wilson
Rudyard Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature and the youngest at the time to be so rewarded. His children’s stories and poems have been enduring expressions of his times, many tied to India, the country of his birth.
Five Nations is a collection of poems covering the wide range of the British Kingdom at the time, though there is some debate as to what the Five Nations refer. There are two groups of poems in these volumes, unnamed poems and the service poems. Many of these have military themes and range over many wars of the British Empire.
Verses, Popular and Humorous (1900) was the second collection of poems by Australian poet Henry Lawson. It features some of the poet's earlier major works, including "The Lights of Cobb and Co", "Saint Peter" and "The Grog-An'-Grumble-Steeplechase". Most of the poems in the volume had been written after the publication of In the Days When the World was Wide and Other Verses in 1896.
The original collection includes 66 poems by the author that are reprinted from various sources. Later publications split the collection into two separate volumes: Popular Verses and Humorous Verses, though the contents differed from the original list.
Patrick Brontë (father of the famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anna) is mainly remembered as a father, reverend and teacher, but he also was a poet and a novelist. Cottage Poems, his first published work, he gives gentle spiritual advice and guidance to the community, colleagues and members of his congregation in the form of lyrical letters.
Even if one is simply interested in his daughters' works, it is still interesting to see where the sisters' inspiration to write may have come from.
A collection of poems about life. Written in an easy and interesting style this book includes poems about many parts of family life, motherhood, babies, dads, and youth. None of them long, they focus the listener on the blessings of life.
Published by the Religious Tract Society in London, The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman is a collection of domestic, spiritual, and fanciful poems from the point of view of a woman, a housewife, and a Christian. The natural, supernatural, and solidly mundane are mixed together as well as separated into two parts: Indoors and Outdoors.
Summary by Clarica.
Irradiations; Sand and Spray, is the first book of poetry by John Gould Fletcher, published in 1915. Mr Fletcher was part of a group of poets known as imagist poets, which included Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound commended Fletcher for the individuality of rhythm in this, his first volume of poems. Fletcher describes his views on the rhythm of poetry as thus: “I maintain that poetry is capable of as many gradations in cadence as music is in time.”
Better known for his biting satire, Mencken's first book was this small volume of verses.
Cowboy Poetry began as a 19th Century Performance Art staged around a crackling campfire, referencing tall tales and personal stories, lost girlfriends, and love of the vast unboundaried West. It was best accompanied by a hot tin cup of boiled coffee, dunked biscuits, and beef jerky. The rhymed couplets were easy to remember, and once the day's drive was done, everybody had a few hours to listen to friends and wonder at the stars. Badger Clark gave voice and record to this unique American folk art, and built on it to express his own creative genius. He was declared the first Poet Laureate of South Dakota, or as he liked to say, “Poet Lariat.” Summary by Ed Humpal
The author worked as a dude wrangler Glacier National Park and lived on his ranch near Eureka, Monatana. This is the first book of his poems, which he often recited for the tourists. His other books include, "Giggles from Glacier Guides" and "Mountain Memories."
Although best known for the creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle did not only write works of mystery and of adventure - he was also a rather successful poet. This is a collection of poems written by the famous author.
This is a collection of poems on various topics by Vachel Lindsay.
Please note that the Booker T. Washington trilogy had to be omitted from this collection.
Walter Crane is better known as an artist and illustrator of children’s books. His illustrations defined a whole genre which influenced the field for many years. He was also involved in various socialist causes and leant his artistic talent to many left-leaning publications. Some of the sentiments can be found reflected in this volume of his own poetry. The first section contains poems published for the first time, while the second section contains many verses that appeared in other publications and books. The verses are illustrated with black and white engravings of his art, of course. The publication page contains this note, “ This Edition on Large Paper is limited to Sixty-five copies for England and Thirty-five for America. This copy is No. 45 of the English Edition.”
John Hall Wheelock is an American poet who during his student years at Harvard University was editor-in-chief of The Harvard Monthly, and began to publish his first poems. He later worked for publisher Charles Sribner and Sons finally becoming senior editor. He received many awards for his poetry including the Golden Rose in 1936 for the most distinguished contribution to American poetry of that year. The poems in The Black Panther reveal a deep spirituality but also a strong humanistic reach, sometimes dark and sometimes celebratory and full of joy. The collection begins with the powerful title poem and consists of three sections: Dim Wisdoms, Space and Solitude, The Lost Traveller’s Dream, and The Divine Fantasy.
This is Volume 3: Nature Poems of the collected works of Madison Julius Cawein, an American poet from Kentucky. It's arranged in four sections: In The Shadow of the Beeches, Tansy and Sweet-Alyssum, Weeds by the Wall, and A Voice on the Wind. It is dedicated to "Doctor Henry A. Cottel whose kind words of friendship and approval have encouraged me most when I most needed encouragement."
The first of more than thirty books of poetry by Canadian poet Bliss Carman. "The poems in this volume have been collected with reference to their similarity of tone. They are variations on a single theme, more or less aptly suggested by the title, Low Tide on Grand Pré. It seemed better to bring together between the same covers only those pieces of work which happened to be in the same key, rather than to publish a larger book of more uncertain aim. B.C. by Grand Pré, September, 1893."
This is a book of 57 sections divided into 2 parts. The first part is comprised of 26 poems & the second part concludes with 31 assorted stories & otherwise. John Kendrick Bangs had been known as a jokester & prankster; was also known to be the editor of Puck, perhaps the foremost American humor magazine. Take a peak and see how you end up with a grin on your face and in your heart as well. That is honest Bangsian writing.
The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio. The first edition survives only in a single fragmentary copy; its date cannot be fixed with certainty since its title page is missing, though many scholars judge it likely to be from 1599, the year the second edition appeared with the attribution to Shakespeare.
This version of The Passionate Pilgrim, contains 15 romantic sonnets and short poems. The works contained, while disputed as to authorship, are in this writer's most humble opinion among the best of the age.
A collection of short poems on various themes by the author.
Poet Duncan M. Matheson lived in troubled times. These were times of World War I and its accompanying carnage, privation and pervasive adversity. Then to add to this there was the explosion - the December 1917 Halifax explosion - the Canadian maritime disaster that would leave in its wake nearly 2,000 dead and 9,000 injured. Matheson was the principal of Alexander McKay School in Halifax at the time of the explosion and would witness the resultant death of fifty of his school's students.
But despite this backdrop of horror, Matheson - the skilled and observant poet, the man who not only was responsible as principal for the edification of young minds, but who, as a poet, assumed the added burden of explicating life's events through his writing - shone as a bastion of hope and courage in a seemingly crumbling world.
This man, this principal, this scholar, this gifted poet could in his writing transcend the horror of everyday events and speak of the beauty, splendor and potential of life. Matheson possessed the hope and fervent desire for a brighter future a world away from this current outbreak of destruction, this explosion of death and grief. You will hear his passion for what is, what is not, and what should and can be in these, Duncan M. Matheson's transcendent works of inspirational poetry.
Rudyard Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature and the youngest at the time to be so rewarded. His children’s stories and poems have been enduring expressions of his times, many tied to India, the country of his birth.Five Nations is a collection of poems covering the wide range of the British Kingdom at the time, though there is some debate as to what the Five Nations refer. There are two groups of poems in these volumes, unnamed poems and the service poems. Many of these have military themes and range over many wars of the British Empire. Volume II contains poems of the Five Nations and Service Poems.
This is Volume 4: Poems of Mystery and of Myth and Romance of the collected works of Madison Julius Cawein, an American poet from Kentucky. It falls into three sections: Poems of Mystery, Poems of Myth and Romance, and Song and Story.
Madison Cawein from Kentucky, displays a wider range of his poetic dreams, from the bright to the dark.
Gilbert Frankau was a prolific and popular British novelist who wrote both in prose and verse and had fifty works published over a fifty year period. He is considered one of the war poets of World War I. This collection of his poems, published in 1918, reflect his experiences which included fighting in some of the major battles of the war at Loos, Ypres and the Somme. Summary by Nemo.
These are the original, tender and thoughtful poems of a young female artist who lived and died in seventeenth century London -- only 70 years after William Shakespeare. Her diction is readily accessible to listeners after almost 350 years and the subjects on her mind we can imagine on the minds of educated young women today. She writes often of love, broken hearts and the beauty of reason and self-control -- as if she knew the Age of Enlightenment was just around the corner. She also opines intelligently and optimistically on death and the soul although she mentions God seldomly. More commonly she betrays her familiarity with Ovid referencing Greek nymphs and heroes while projecting herself in the scene in a charming girlish way. Her poetic prowess was noticed by critics who openly doubted a mere girl could write with such touching originality on her own. Her rejoinder verse in this collection shows admirable restraint and conclusivity. One only wonders what would have followed as she matured and what artistic output of Miss Killigrew the world has done without. She died of smallpox in her twenty-fifth year.
Alice Meynell was an English essayist, critic, and poet who was also a leading suffragist, serving as vice-president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League, She and her husband Wilfrid Meynell were active in publishing and editing literary works including helping to launch the first works of Francis Thompson, author of "Hound of Heaven." The Meynell's converted to Roman Catholicism and many of the poems in this volume, published just five years before her death, reflect religious themes.
Joyce KIlmer may yet be an obscure poet had he not had his poem, Trees, published in Poetry in 1913. But, this book precedes that, and shows his flowing lyricism and the dripping sentimentality of his earlier work.
Louis Untermeyer introduced may students to poetry through his many collections that he edited. His own poetry ranges from inspirational to cynical. Challenge is his first collection of poems, mature, but reflecting many of his early struggles. The range from the deeply spiritual to the sentimental and social commentary.
Edgar A. Guest is sometimes known as the "people's poet," noted for his homespun verses of everyday American life and traditional values of home, family, country and faith. This is a collection of his poems reflecting these themes with warmth and humor.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Walter Percy entered the ministry and pastored churches in New England and Pennsylvania, often speaking on behalf of the temperance movement. Many of his poems were written for his children and are here collected under the topics: nature, fireside, sentiment, memories, philosophy, homilies, country, humor. sacred, song poems, and miscellaneous poems.
Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was a Canadian poet and journalist, published across Canada and the United States. She also worked as an editor for the Globe and was part of the editorial staff for The Advertiser in London, Ontario. This collection of short poems by Ms. Wetherald, as with most of her works, chiefly centers around the beauty of nature and the changing of seasons, with occasional brief departures suiting her mood at the time.
A collection of charming poems by James W. Foley, Poet Laureate of North Dakota where he was also city editor of the Bismarck Tribune. Each poem is written from the point of view of children or about children.
George Robert Sims was an English journalist, poet, dramatist, novelist, prolific in his output and known for his satire and humor. These qualities are reflected in this collection small poems originally published in the literary magazine, “The Referee.”
A collection of poetry by the Boston poetess. Sections are nature, love, miscellaneous, sonnets and 'for my nieces and nephews'.
A collection of poems by the Gloucestershire-born English poet Ivor Gurney describing his feelings about the First World War, during which he served on the Western Front and was wounded by a mustard gas attack, and its aftermath.
Katherine Hale is the pen name of Amelia Beers Warnock Garvin, a Canadian poet and literary critic. This volume is one of her collections with the background of World War I as a theme, but full of faith and hope.
This stirring collection of inspirational war-time poems by the renowned author Richard le Gallienne, offers an insightful examination of a world forced to endure one of the most trying and tragic times in history.
In these magnificent poems we witness first hand the pathos of humanity torn apart by World War I, a war like no other, a war affecting all walks of life and inspiring acts of courage, self-sacrifice and gallantry on a scale previously unknown. This was a war that brought society together in ways formerly inconceivable, that brought classes together, that brought souls and spirits together to fight for a cause that was deemed honorable, righteous and just. This was also a war that brought nations to their knees and people to the abyss of despair.
The remarkable skill of le Gallienne takes the reader to the brink of his own despair and frustration, then by demonstrating the power of determination, hope, inspiration and the anticipation of success, this distinguished poet demonstrates the strength of the human spirit to overcome, conquer, and triumph, despite conditions of unimaginable adversity and deprivation.