A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

This volume offers twenty-five selected papers by the leading Latin scholar A. J Woodman, and focuses on the close relationship between Latin poetry and historical writing, or ancient history, from the late first century BC to the early second century AD.

For this collection, the prize-winning poet, Carol Ann Duffy, selected 40 of the best world poets writing today - 20 men and 20 women - and invited each of them to select a love poem written by the opposite sex, to appear opposite their own love poem. Poems from other centuries are included.

Things seem to be happening very quickly. Some things were secrets. And I knew these secrets would never be appropriate, for any conversation, in any lifetime. However, it was my reality. Was anything good going to come out of this? There was too much to tell, and no one would understand. I didnt even understandso how could anyone else? It seemed improbable that I would get what was inside, out of me. It wasnt how I was raised to discuss this negativity . . . to air out ones dirty laundry, it just wasnt accepted. Was it all my fault? These vulgar and unprecedented events that were beginning to destroy me. I decided to block it out, keep it inside and keep moving with my life. Trying, waiting for the day I would get past it and walk through the door of the other side. The other side of all this madness. In the meantime, I had to do something with my emotions, my secrets and my feelings. They were locked up, tighter than tight. I began to write in journals. Entries that were poems and anecdotal stories of what was happening in my life. I had to become my own inspiration. I had to somehow get what was inside...out. A young girls life filled with devastation, tragedy and self-destruction was all on its way. It was already here! Still maintaining a happy, ambitious life but harboring guilt, anger and resentment. And dealing with the world and its own evolving. This is the story of over ten years of writings, from the ages of 1426 years. Someone leading themselves out of the dark and into the light. This was my way and this is my story. My story . . . in poetry.

A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.