Key Features Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes & techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical & literary background Modern & historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms ...

As a poet editor & essayist T S Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth century poetry This selection which was made by Eliot himself

Includes:: many of his most celebrated works including The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock & The Waste Land Other volumes in this series Auden Betjemen Plath Hughes & Yeats

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TS Eliot
- editor poet critic & publisher
- was the greatest poet of his generation The winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature

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This selection which was made by Eliot himself is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks The selection

Includes:: the whole of The Waste Land

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Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular & compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (TLS) This Selected Poems compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer & accompanied by insightful notes is the first edition to represent the full arc of Gunn's inimitable career ' The poetry of Thom Gunn was much admired in his lifetime & at the same time often misunderstood & underestimated The scale of his achievement & its uniqueness
- a masterful Elizabethan lyric poet writing in the second half of the twentieth century
- is just now becoming properly appreciated Anonymous in voice even in the service of the most intimate subject matter acute in observation particularly the urban experience with San Francisco the principal site Gunn is not merely the poet of the druggy '60s in California or the plague of the AIDS epidemic but of the deeper-running themes shared by Shakespeare Baudelaire William Carlos Williams & all his greatest exemplars of the artist's moral & imaginative engagement with the world as it actually is in the broadest possible sense not as contemporary fashion might have it be Which strikes me who knew & loved the man & poet as a kind of heroism' August Kleinzahler' Thom Gunn smuggled the lyric tradition out of post-war Britain & gave it cool gracious renaissance in California His poetry evokes the wild life of the body with madrigal-like elegance' Fiona Sampson' Gunn's work illustrates with unusual clarity some of the debates poetry in English has pursued in the twentieth century
- form versus improvisation diction versus talk the American way versus the English tradition even at times authenticity versus art To contain these contradictory impulses & to have generated a body of work which anybody wanting to understand the period & identify some of its best poems will find essential reading
- this is quite an achievement' Sean O' Brien



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Selected Poems draws on all the books Elizabeth Jennings published before Growing-Points It represents the poet's own distillation of the first two decades of her writing
- the poems which established her as one of the most passionate & precise of our writers a woman of human values religious vision & natural sympathy ' The outstanding thing about Jennings' poetry' wrote Douglas Dunn 'is its wisdom hard earned from grief & religious faith' & Peter Levi says ' She is one of the few living poets we could not do without'
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Over the course of his short life John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity By the end of his brief career he had written poems of such beauty imagination & generosity of spirit that he had
- unwittingly
- fulfilled his wish that he should be among the English poets after my death' This wide-ranging selection of Keats's poetry contains youthful verse such as his earliest known poem Imitation of Spenser'; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820
- including Lamia' Isabella' The Eve of St Agnes' Ode to a Nightingale' & Hyperion'
- & later celebrated works such as La Belle Dame sans Merci' Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work but which illustrate his more earthy playful side & superb ear for everyday language



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This new selection of Rossetti's poems brings together works by one of the most significant nineteenth-century English poets It



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' Lorca brought an understanding of the paradox that was Spain
- sensuality chafing under a rigid moral code individual desire
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Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is regarded as the most important poet of the early eighteenth century An invalid from infancy Pope devoted his energies towards literature & achieved remarkable success with his first published work at the age of 21 A succession of brilliant poems followed including An Essay on Criticism (1711) Windsor Forest (1713) & his masterpiece The Rape of the Lock (1712) A second period of great poetry was begun in 1728 with the appearance of the first Dunciad All these works which exhibit Pope's astonishing human insight his wide sympathies & powers of social observation (displayed to greatest effect in his talent for satire) feature in this selection In his introduction
- an eloquent defence of Pope's poetic practice
- Pat Rogers argues that we must abandon our Romantic conception of poetry as a record of fleeting & subjective states if we are to understand Pope fully Instead we must see him as an accomplished practitioner of the poetry of ideas & of satirical reflection on human society This collection is chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition of Pope's major works ABOUT THE SERIES For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features including expert introductions by leading authorities helpful notes to clarify the text up-to-date bibliographies for further study & much more

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