Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. Contributors include John Milton, Ovid, E.E. Cummings, Thom Gunn, John Donne, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and many others.

Here are 200 irresistible love letters from over the centuries, love letters both historic and fictional, love letters by poets and by princes, love letters enchanting, tragic, comic, superbly selected, beautifully printed, conveniently portable, to have with you wherever and whenever you're in the mood for love.

'There is such a strange and mysterious intimacy from exchanging letters. It mixes the emotional (the thoughts and sentiments) and the physical (writing it down). All in all this is both a fun yet stirring collection.'

The major seventeenth-century English poet between Shakespeare and Milton, Donne is chiefly celebrated as a love poet. But he was also the author of magnificent satires and epistles, and a series of religious poems including the Holy Sonnets. All these genres are represented in this volume, together with a selection from his prayers, letters and sermons, presenting a complete portrait of a great poet an an extraordinary man.

The greatest English religious poet of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was a Jesuit priest and literary scholar whose life ended prematurely after his exhausting pastoral work among the slums of Liverpool and Dublin. His poems are dazzling celebrations of God's endless creative power couched in a uniquely expressive poetic diction, and all his mature poetry is her reprinted, together with illuminating fragments from journals, letters, sermons and lectures in which he expounds his literary and religious outlook.

Probably the most important single figure in nineteenth century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exerted an enormous influence over later writers, especially French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire and Mallarme, and through them he affected the entire field of modern literature from THE WASTE LAND to LOLITA. Probably best known for his macabre short stories, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Poe's influence was spread primarily through his poems and essays which are here reprinted. The current volume includes all his extant poems and extensive selections from his essays on poetry.

The pieces in this volume are taken from all religions and traditions with the purpose of providing material for prayer and meditation. They are arranged in seven sections following the Canonical Hours of the Chruch: Matins, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. Each section gathers poems and prose according to theme and mood and suiting the hours of the day. Sources include Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, Christina Rossetti, Cowper, St Anselm, Cardinal Newman, Bunyan, Blake, Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson, Herrick, Wesley, Mother Theresa, Tennyson, Spenser, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, St Francis, the Book of Common Prayer, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Distringuished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose and then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.

There are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking Back

In the long history of English literature William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the writer who achieved the most dramatic transformations of the poetic scene almost singlehanded. A leading figure among the Romantic generation which included Coleridge and Scott, he created out of his personal communion with nature a new poetic which had a profound moral and spiritual influence on the entire nineteenth century. The present selection includes all his famous lyrics and substantial extracts from narrative poems including The Prelude.

A leader of the twentieth-century Irish nationalist movement, who eventually became one of the Free States's senators, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is also the greatest poet that nation has yet produced. The present selection includes poetry from every period in life, dealing with all the topics closest to his heart: love, death, old age, ambition, the poet's craft, and of course the history and destiny of Ireland.

This is a collection of classic animal poems. The poems include: Robert Burns's "To a Mouse"; Ted Hughes's "Hawk Roosting"; Christopher Smart's "My Cat Jeoffry"; and e.e. cummings's grasshopper-shaped poem.

Blake's explosive lyrical genius is here represented by the full text of 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience', plus a wide range of marvellous short poems unpublished in his lifetime. In addition there is a selection from the Prophetic Books in which the poet develops his own story of creation - alternately crazy and magnificent and from his dramatic and didactic poems and prose writings which reveal Blake as a major poet of the Romantic movement.

Byron's poetry took Europe by storm in the early nineteenth century and the poems which made him a star are here represented by a selection of the early lyrics, including still popular pieces such as 'She walks in beauty' and 'We'll go a no more a-roving'. But Byron's real talent was for comedy. He is the greatest comic poet of the Romantic movement and his comic verse is here represented by BEPPO, A VISION OF JUDGEMENT and selections from his greatest masterpiece, DON JUAN, which satirizes the very reputation for amourous adventures which helped to make Byron himself famous.

The major male poet of nineteenth-century America (his female counterpart is Emily Dickinson), Whitman is the poet of grand passions great open spaces, lofty mourning and male love. Written in free metres, his verse ranges across every kind of subject in a characteristically exalted mood. This volume includes a wide selection from every period of Whitman's creative career, including many poems from the celebrated LEAVES OF GRASS.

Burnt-out at twenty-three, Rimbaud has become a model for the poet as wayward genius. Nevertheless, he wrote a substantial amount of lyric and dramatic verse in his few years of activity. This volume contains all his mature output, together with several short prose works, including A SEASON IN HELL, and relevant passages from the poet's letters.

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS. Assembled in this beautifully created pocket gift hardback is a wide range of erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.