Poetry for Pleasure is an anthology representative of the great wealth of English poetry written between the sixteenth century and the present day. The book is arranged in fifteen sections, each devoted to a different theme. The first two of these comprise verse written mainly for, or about, the young or the very young. Subsequent sections deal with such varied subjects as country pleasures, love and friendship, music and dancing, the sea, time, age, sleep, and death. In fact they cover almost the whole range of human experience. Inevitably, a number of poems will be familiar to most readers, but some will be new to many.

his book is designed to encourage and upskill teachers to introduce and explore poetry in the classroom with their students. Poetry has many proven benefits for learning outcomes and can help significantly in students' literacy journey. Dr Murphy's book is packed full of poem-driven activities and tips for engaging students with poetry. Dr Murphy says "As well as writing books, I am a poet. I love crafting poetry on all kinds of topics, and in a range of forms, both rhyming and unrhyming."

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself. In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

From the winner of the Bollingen Prize in poetry and author of the classic bestseller "Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?" comes a unique, highly entertaining book for anyone who wants to be a better reader and writer of poetry.