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Chicago Poems is an early collection of poems by American poet Carl Sandburg. This little volume includes the following poems: Chicago, Sketch, Masses, Lost, The Harbor, They Will Say, Mill-Doors, Halsted Street Car, Clark Street Bridge, Passers-by, The Walking Man of Rodin, Subway, The Shovel Man, A Teamster's Farewell, Fish Crier, Picnic Boat, Happiness, Muckers, Blacklisted, Graceland, Child of the Romans, The Right to Grief, Mag, Onion Days, Population...
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The cycle of 55 sonnets that comprise Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus" were written in a period of three weeks during 1922, a time which the poet himself described as a "savage creative storm." Inspired by the death of his daughter's friend, Wera Knoop, Rilke commenced to the production of "Sonnets to Orpheus," a work filled with mythological and biblical allusions. During the same burst of creative energy he set to working on the completion...
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Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics was C. S. Lewis's first published work. Lewis was twenty years old and had just returned from military service in the First World War. His tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick, encouraged him in publishing the book, although it was unusual at Lewis's age, as writers were expected to wait longer before sharing their work with the world. The book is composed of three different sections of poetry. The poems take on several...
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This is the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798, written by the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor. The collection is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English romantic movement, and despite negative critical reception at first, subsequent editions were produced and the book has remained a staple in poetry and British literature studies for over two centuries. Wordsworth and Taylor sought to...
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Robert Service dreamed of a life of adventure and freedom to live and write as he wanted, surrounded by nature and the beauty of the world. Born in Lancashire, England, he developed an urge early on to travel abroad, and set his sights on the rough and tumble "wild west" of Canada. Part journalist and part storyteller, he ventured up and down the west coast of the United States and wrote romantic stories of cowboys, gold prospectors, and characters...
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First published in 1918, "A Spring Harvest" is the posthumous collection of poetry by Geoffrey Bache Smith, a close high school and college friend of J. R. R. Tolkien. Together with their friends Rob Gilson and Christopher Wiseman, the four young men formed the semi-secret Tea Club and Barrovian Society while in school, where they discussed their artistic interests and plans for the future. The outbreak of World War I interrupted the men's plans however,...
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Alfred Edward Housman was an English poet and classical scholar whose work became a major force in turn of the century English poetry. Unlike his contemporaries, Housman's poetry does not qualify as Romantic, Victorian, or Modernist, and is not overly sentimental or optimistic; instead, his deeply pessimistic and ironic poetry, written clearly and succinctly, earned Housman recognition as one of the foremost classicists of his time. His best-known...
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Idylls of the King (1859-1885) is a cycle of narrative poems by British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Written while Tennyson was serving as Poet Laureate, Idylls of the King reworks the medieval Arthurian legend in blank verse and with an elegiac tone. Based on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and the early British Mabinogion manuscripts, Tennyson's work connects an ancient tradition to the reign and ideals of Queen Victoria.
"The Coming of Arthur"...
9) The Prelude
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First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative work. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the reader back to Wordsworth's formative moments of childhood and youth, and detailing his experiences as a radical undergraduate in France at the time of the Revolution. Initially inspired by Coleridge's exhortation...
10) Medea
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The influence of Euripides on the development of the dramatic genre cannot be overstated. Along with Sophocles and Aeschylus he is regarded as one of the three great Greek tragedians from classical antiquity. One of the most important of Euripides' surviving dramas is "Medea", the story of its title character, the wife of Jason of the Argonauts, who seeks revenge upon her unfaithful husband when he abandons her for a another bride. Set in Corinth...
11) Enough Rope
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A founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York City writers, critics, and actors, Dorothy Parker rose to literary fame during the first part of the 20th century. An accomplished poet, writer, critic, satirist, playwright, and screenwriter, Parker was known for her sharp wit in describing 20th century urban life. Although she disliked this characterization, because she thought it undermined her writing, it is primarily for this...
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Initially conceived after reading the works of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was known for his early studies of Native American culture, "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is an epic poem based on the legends of the Ojibwa Indians of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Written in 1855 in trochaic tetrameter, the tale is set in the picturesque Pictured Rocks area along the south shore of Lake Superior. The lyrical descriptions of this...
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Measure for Measure - William Shakespeare - Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. Originally published in the First Folio of 1623, where it was listed as a comedy, the play's first recorded performance occurred in 1604. The play's main themes include justice, "mortality and mercy in Vienna," and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." Mercy...
14) The Kalevala
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"The Kalevala" is a collection of Finnish and Karelian poetry, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from oral folklore and mythology. Lönnrot was a physician, botanist, and linguist, who in 1828 began collecting folk songs and poetry of Finland, traveling extensively in order to obtain his sources. "The Kalevala", first published in 1835, is considered to be one of the most important works of Finnish literature, and regarded as the national epic of Finland....
15) The Faerie Queen
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Considered to be one of the most difficult poems in the history of the English language, "The Faerie Queen" by Edmund Spenser is a marvelous epic poem depicting the virtues of the legendary King Arthur and his knights in a mythical place called Faerieland. Spenser based his interpretation of the virtues on those named by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Each one of the seven books discusses a different hero who displays one of these virtues; however,...
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First published in English by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 from its original Farsi, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in the later part of the 11th century. Omar Khayyam's poetry, which received very little international notoriety in its own day, achieved classic status when it was discovered and rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald over seven...
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Born in 1572 in London England, John Donne was an English Jacobean poet of exceptional skill, whose poetry was known for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor. While Donne was well educated and his poetic talents considerable he struggled for much of his life to provide for his family. Having published only two volumes during his lifetime, he was not a professional poet. Despite this his legacy on the world of poetry is a significant...
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The youngest of the well-known Brontë siblings, Anne Brontë (1820-1849) grew up drawing and writing poetry in secret. As a child, Anne spent countless hours on the Yorkshire moors with her sister, Emily, creating an imaginary world called Gondal. Anne attended school at age fifteen, and there she experienced an episode of spiritual crisis, which is evidenced in many of her poems. She later worked as a governess before collaborating with her sisters,...
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This collection of poems by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow includes some of his most memorable and popular verse. In "Evangeline", arguably his most famous work, we have the story of an Acadian girl who searches for her lost love Gabriel during the time of the Great Upheaval. "Evangeline and Other Selected Poems" is altogether a collection of thirty-nine poems including an abridged selection from "The Song of Hiawatha".
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Ralph Waldo Emerson is best known as being a leader of the transcendentalist movement, a philosophy that emerged in the mid 19th century in New England. Transcendentalism was a general protest against established society and culture at the time that sought an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. In this...
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