Wilde glamorous & notorious more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown & intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years

Includes:: the haunting elegy to his young sister & the grieving lyric at the death of his father. The religious drama of his romance with Rome is captured here as well as its resolution in his renewed love of ancient Greece. He explores forbidden sexual desires pays homage to the great theatre stars & poets of his day observes cityscapes with impressionist intensity. His final masterpiece The Ballad of Reading Gaol tells the painful story of his own prison experience & calls for universal compassion. This edition of Wildes verse presents the full range of his achievement as a poet.

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This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Includes:: all the poems contained in the Definitive

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The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work from Hawk in the Rain to the bestselling Birthday Letters. It also

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Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson & Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later when Eliot & Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina & a consistent individuality of style & vision made him a survivor immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness humanity & humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike. ...

William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth & he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan & neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men & women of ordinary thoughts sights & sounds & his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art. Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy & his wife Mary by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem ' The Prelude' was completed in 1805 but was not published until after his death & it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry. ...

This classic collection of stories moves from England France & Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It

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The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America & England & include some of Maughams most famous tales; Flotsam & Jetsam the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; The Man with the Scar & notably the opening story The Vessel of Wrath a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse & a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles & his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time & place. ...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays & those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'. Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov & O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire irony & the macabre in which the stupidities & hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection

Includes:: Sredni Vastor & The Unrest Cure. ' We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'

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These outstanding stories of American award-winning novelist John Cheever show the power & range of one of the finest short story writers of the century. Stories of love & squalor set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness contend with time social change & the chaos of history. ...

This is a collection of stunning short stories from the most acclaimed Science Fiction author of any generation. Arthur C Clarke ...