English Poetry

The Song of Roland is acknowledged today as the first masterpiece of French vernacular literature and one of the world’s greatest epic poems. Written down around the year 1090, The Song of Roland finely crafted verses tell of the betrayal and defeat of Charlemagne’s beloved nephew at the Pass of Roncevaux in the Pyrenees and of the revenge subsequently sought on his behalf.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

A dark, allegorical, Gothic horror fable in verse telling of seduction, enthrallment, and deep sisterly love by the British Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti. The goblin market men, selling sweet and delicious fruits, inveigle Laura, a young girl, to partake of their tempting wares. Soon, she is lost to the world and her life begins slowly to fade away. Only the courage of her sister, Lizzie, can possibly save her from her fate. Will it be enough?

The Iliad and The Odyssey are epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer, of which the written versions are dated to the 8th century BCE. Chronicling events in the Greek Bronze Age, this magnificent pair of poems forms the cornerstone of Western literature. If The Iliad is a classic war story, The Odyssey is symbolic of the individual’s journey through life.

Piers Plowman, William Langland's visionary medieval work about one man's quest for the true Christian life, is an allegorical journey through dream visions and visions within dreams. During the course of his journey, the narrator (William Langland) meets Piers Plowman, who gradually reveals himself to be the son of God. Through Piers, William learns of the virtues in poverty, the temptations of wealth, and of the perfect society that is to come under the rule of Piers Plowman.

Diary entries, medical records, book reports, phone calls, dates (the romantic kind), dreams, index cards, passive aggressive post-it notes, stories, emails to professors, dates (the month/day kind), worries, and resumes that never led to job interviews....

Wordsworth's The Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it. It also tells of his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turns its back.

Under the order of King Pelias, Jason embarks on a perilous journey to steal the Golden Fleece from the Land of Colchis. Far from heroic, Jason is the typical everyman. Often compared with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts is the only surviving poem from the Hellenistic period and was hugely influential on later literature, especially the Roman poetry of Virgil and Ovid.

The Asking takes its title from the closing line of one of its newly appearing poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking.” In its substantial opening section of new work, Jane Hirshfield continues her signature affirmation of the central contradictions, uncertainties, and harvests of astonishment that shape our human lives. A forefront spokesperson for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, Hirshfield offers, as indispensable compass, the choice to embrace what comes. I

Christina Rossetti’s poetry has never disappeared from view. Critical interest in her poetry swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, a resurgence largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism; much of this commentary focuses on gender issues in her poetry and on Rossetti as a woman poet. Collected here are 16 of her most beautiful, haunting, and renowned poems.

The many journals which reported Browning’s untimely death all spoke of her as the greatest woman poet in English literature. The highly respected Edinburgh Review expressed the prevailing view when it said that she had no equal in the literary history of any country: “Such a combination of the finest genius and the choicest results of cultivation and wide-ranging studies has never been seen before in any woman", and the esteem in which she is held has never dimmed with her poetry still widely studied and admired today. Collected here are 16 of her most beautiful, haunting, and renowned poems.

American poet, critic, and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe is universally recognized for his cultivation of the macabre in fiction. His stories are characterized by an original kind of supernatural horror, often using the awareness of death as a catalyzing force in its own right. His tales and poems brim with psychological depth and intense imagery, made vivid through his musical language and hypnotic rhythms, which are especially captivating when heard aloud.

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive - the second book in a planned experimental triptych - is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm.

"The Theogony" (“Birth of the Gods”) is a poem by Hesiod which describes the origin, position and relationships of the gods of the Greek pantheon. Hesiod created a synthesis of the diverse Greek traditions concerning the gods, in the form of a hymn invoking Zeus and the Muses. The Theogony is the first known Greek mythical cosmogony. However, it should not be considered as the authoritative source of Greek mythology, but rather as a portrait of a dynamic tradition that was recorded around 700 BCE.

The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, and ruthless, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and déjà vu.

Aaron Space is an astronaut! Young children will love this poem where they'll see him get to do all sorts of cool stuff in space. Being an astronaut is a lot of work, but Aaron loves his job!

The horror of the male experience during World War One was well documented in poetry, memoir, and fiction throughout the 20th century. Women's voices of despair, endurance and anger, however, have often been forgotten. These poems of political fury, widowed brides, industry undertaken, and sons and friends loved and lost, give a heartbreaking insight into the experience of women throughout World War One.

Jason and the Golden Fleece is one of the finest tales of Ancient Greece, an epic journey of adventure and trial standing beside similar stories of Perseus, Theseus and the Labours of Heracles. The finest classic account comes from Apollonius of Rhodes, the Greek poet of the 3rd century BCE and librarian at Alexandria. Though less well-known than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and much shorter, it is an epic poem which is both exciting and moving, with remarkably vivid portraits of the main characters, Jason and Medea.

Drawing inspiration from the art of Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, Carol beautifully weaves together the shattered fragments of her heart, transforming them into a life worth living. Divided into three sections, "Shattered", "In Pieces", and "Making Broken Beautiful", this book of poems chronicles the full spectrum of the grieving experience. With raw honesty, Carol illuminates the pain and loneliness that accompany loss, the disorienting struggle to adapt to a changed world, and the gentle steps towards self-discovery.

After a century of civil strife in Rome and Italy, the poet Virgil wrote The Aeneid to honor the emperor Augustus by praising Aeneas, Augustus's legendary ancestor. As a patriotic epic imitating Homer, The Aeneid also set out to provide Rome with a literature equal to that of Greece.