More than 80 poems by 50 American and British masters celebrate real and metaphorical journeys. Poems by Whitman, Byron, Millay, Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, many others.

Walt Whitman's poem was first published in the 1856 collection Leaves of Grass.

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Great Short PoemsThis outstanding 150-poem anthology spans over 400 years of English and American literary history. Memorable compositions include Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," Blake's "The Tyger," Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Shelley's "Ozymandias," as well as works by Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, and many others. Includes three selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Road Not Taken," "Loveliest of Trees," and "Ozymandias." Songs for the Open RoadCollection of more than 80 poems by 50 American and British masters celebrates travel, adventure and the many real and metaphorical journeys each of us take in the course of our lives. Works by Whitman, Byron, Millay, Sandburg, Service, Bliss Carman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, and many others. Includes two selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The New Colossus" and "The Railway Train."

Walt Whitman is widely regarded as one of the masters of American poetry. Here are collected his finest poems, a perfect companion for any fan of Whitman's work.