Written between the years 1798 and 1801, The Lucy Poems is a charming, pocket-sized collection of William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, first published in one of his best-known works, Lyrical Ballads. The lyrical poetry in this volume explores nature motifs alongside melancholic themes of grief and unrequited love, surrounding a young English girl’s death. Lucy’s identity continues to be unknown and she is commonly thought to be figurative, a literary device for Wordsworth to reflect his own feelings of longing and loss on to. This collection includes all five of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems: - ‘Stange fits of passion I have known’ - ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’ - ‘I travelled among unknown men’ - ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’ - ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ Wordsworth was traveling Germany with his sister, Dorothy, at the time of writing this series. His growing irritation at his traveling companion and his desire to be reunited with his close friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is evident in the works. Four of the five poems were first published in the collection Lyrical Ballads, composed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, that went on to form part of the early Romantic movement in England. This small edition of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems has been republished by Read & Co. Books Ragged Hand, complete with introductory excerpts from Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Carlyle. The Lucy Poems is an ideal collection for lovers of Romantic era poetry and Wordsworth’s beautiful nature imagery - the perfect companion for those who love reading poetry on the go.

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one’s own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus.

The eighth Quarternote Chapbook by winner of the National Book Award and PSA Shelley Memorial Prize.

Bars Fight, a ballad telling the tale of an ambush by Native Americans on two families in 1746 in a Massachusetts meadow, is the oldest known work by an African-American author. Passed on orally until it was recorded in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts in 1855, the ballad is a landmark in the history of literature that should be on every book lover’s shelves.