Classic Poetry

"Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets...

The most famous of the three canticles that compose The Divine Comedy, "Inferno" describes Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life, with Virgil as a guide. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonizing torture, Dante encounters doomed souls that include the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicidal Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit.

Widely known as the master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe has held the world enraptured for more than 150 years with his dark and powerful works. This collection will sweep you away into a world of literary brilliance.

Conjoints dans une édition posthume de 1869 sous le titre de "Petits poèmes en proses", ces textes auraient dû sans doute s'intituler "Le Spleen de Paris". Tel était en effet l'intitulé auquel Baudelaire songeait. Dans cette marqueterie d'allégories, de pochades fantastiques, de vignettes lyriques, de nouvelles, de scènes de genre et de "doublets" de poèmes versifiés des "Fleurs du Mal", l'auteur traduit avec émotion le quotidien du "grand désert d'homme" dans lequel il muse solitairement, débuchant le grotesque et invoquant le sublime.

Yves Bonnefoy lit ses propres textes, fragments de sa première œuvre "Du mouvement et de l'immobilité du Douve", parue en 1953 jusqu'aux "Planches courbes", recueil publié en 2001. L'unité de l'écriture, en dialogue avec elle-même, se révèle dans la voix de son auteur. Le jeu de miroir, déjà présent dans l'œuvre d'Yves Bonnefoy, prend toute sa dimension dans le mouvement de son propre souffle, dans la respiration du poète qui lit ses vers, à la fois réflexifs et attachés au réel.

In the war a great volume of poetry was written, produced and published in books, periodicals, newspapers or letters back to home. We often think of war as a necessity. We fight for a more just and better world. We often fail. But in our poets we gain a truth and a morality that shocks us, consoles us and holds our values to the light. In this volume we hear poems from the front, from home, from soldiers, from auxiliaries, from friend and from foe.

A witty, bawdy, erotic but classic collection of poetry designed to celebrate the most sensual of human pleasures. Over the ages, many poets have put pen to paper in celebration of that most raw and yet most beautiful of human instincts - erotic love. This anthology includes verse by Herrick, Marlowe, Jonson, Byron, Verlaine, Whitman, Yeats, Cummings and, from our own time, John Betjeman. All aspects of erotic love are to be found in these poems - from the bawdy to the sensuous and tender.

Included in this collection are major works by Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Abraham Crowley, William Cooper, John Donne, Michael Drayton, John Dryden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy, Robert Herrick, Thomas Gray, Ben Johnson, John Keats, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christina Rossetti, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey and more!

Here are the favorites from Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare, and more. And that is not to forget perhaps the greatest of them all: Anon. There are ballads, sonnets, proverbs, and nonsense verse. Poems to inform, divert, satirize, castigate and praise. A collection to make all listeners smile, laugh, remember and discover.

In his perilous journey home after the Trojan War, Odysseus must pass through the land of the Cyclopes, encounter Circe the Enchantress, and face the terrible Charybdis and the six-headed serpent Scylla.

Of the two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, The Odyssey serves to some extent as a sequel to The Iliad. The poem describes the journey home of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. In the Greek sources, the Trojan War lasted 10 years, and Odysseus spent 10 more years on the return journey due to the hostility of Poseidon, the god of earth and sea. Odysseus' fantastical adventures include a period of captivity on Calypso’s island, a visit to the lethargic lotus eaters, an encounter with a one-eyed Cyclops, and more.

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849), The Raven Edition, presents his complete literary output in five volumes. Although best known for his works of macabre fiction, Poe also had a deep interest in scientific discovery and speculative philosophy. This volume contains stories about wild and wonderful experiments and other objects of public curiosity, and essays about language and thought.

This chilling tale of a gruesome monster unleashed into the world by an unthinking scientist was first conceived by 19-year-old Mary Shelley on a dark, rainy night on Lake Geneva. Lord Byron and Percy Shelley challenged their friends to see who could come up with the most horrifying story imaginable. Mary Shelley did, terrifying them all with her nightmare-inspired tale. It is followed by "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Coleridge which was an early haunting influence on the young Mary Shelley.

Paradise Lost is one of the most brilliant works of poetry ever written in the English language. With ease and grace, John Milton's words paint a picture of the fall of man, epically layering his words with all the innocence and treachery that such a fantastic tale deserves. Through Milton's words we witness the downfall of Adam and Eve as well as the epic battle between good and evil.

Primo capolavoro della letteratura occidentale, scritto probabilmente intorno all'VIII secolo a.C., l'Iliade è, insieme con l'Odissea, uno dei pilastri di tutta la cultura occidentale. Nel poema si narrano i 51 giorni della guerra di Troia, dall'ira di Achille ai funerali di Ettore, densi di battaglie ed imprese nelle quali si intrecciano continuamente i destini di dèi ed eroi.

In this audiobook, I read 33 classical French poems. The majority are read twice: once slowly - so you can repeat after me - and once faster, with my personal interpretation of the poem. I will also sometimes tell you about the author, or explain the vocabulary or the meaning of the poem, all in easy everyday French. Musset, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, La Fontaine, Labbé, Valéry... A collection of 33 of the most famous French poems.

There have been many translators of Chinese literature and poetry over time, but Arthur Waley stands out as one of the best known and most loved. This is perhaps because he had an attribute that most others lacked, which is his poetic abilities. Waley was as much a poet himself as a translator, and while his scholarly erudition was matched by a few others at his time, none ever managed to bring out the true character of Chinese poetry quite so well.

More than 60 stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories - later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver's literary development.

One of the greatest prose writers and social commentators of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley here introduces us to a delightfully cynical, comic, and severe group of artists and intellectuals engaged in the most free-thinking and modern kind of talk imaginable. Poetry, occultism, ancestral history, and Italian primitive painting are just a few of the subjects competing for discussion among the amiable cast of eccentrics drawn together at Crome, an intensely English country manor.

Poetry can sometimes be elusive, the real meaning layered beneath another. In this volume American poets give voice to their nation, their hopes, and their aspirations. Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson are joined by Poe, Holmes, Dunbar, and others to pleasure our ears and minds with a rambling stroll through their works. It doesn’t define America, but it captures her mood and the flavours of her soul in the early days of the American dream.