Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation has sometimes been overshadowed both by the achievements of her husband, Robert Browning, and by the romantic story of their elopement. This selection recovers the best work of this independent, passionate and intelligent poet, presenting it on its own terms. Browning emerges as an acute observer of the ......
Poems, Songs and Jests on the Subject of Sensual Love
Sensual pleasure, gentle, violent or comic, is the theme of this anthology of 17th-century erotic writing. "Restoration Bawdy" brings vividly to life a "masquerading age". The book draws on high and low culture and the result is a lively social panorama of Restoration England.
Sir Walter Scott is the great poet of the Scottish people, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed sets Scott in context as both a European Romantic and a Scottish folk poet.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was known to his contemporaries as "the most accomplished gentleman of his age", noble, learned and elegant. A man of his time, at the centre of the dangerous power games of the court of Henry VIII, Surrey is revealed in this selection as a subtle and graceful poet.
In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton (1943) Robert Graves - half a century before Carol Ann Duffy - creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs Milton is ill-used by a distended genius.
Milton's first wife was sixteen when they married. Milton ......
Mary O'Malley is a natural musician. Her poetry alludes to music – the music of Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, the America of jazz and spiritual – and shares forms with it. Music is spiritual and political at the same time. Her themes embrace the child colonised and the adult journey, Ireland and America and Southern Europe, a poetry exploring ......
This is a book of poems with a specific aim: to analyze the power of illusion. It shows how the power of illusion is generated not from "cultural forces" but from the demands of individual choice in the face of implacable circumstance, and considers the Christian guarantee of salvation.
Donald Davie is a poet of the English perspective refracted through historical meditation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities.
