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.

First published in 2012. This work of introduction is designed to escort the reader through some six centuries of English literature. It begins in the fourteenth century at the point at which the language written in our country is recognizably our own, and ends in the 1950s. It is a compact survey, summing up the substance and quality of the individual achievements that make up our literature. The aim is to leave the reader informed about each writer’s main output, sensitive to the special character of his gifts, and aware of his place in the story of our literature as a whole.

A Short History of English Literature is a comprehensive survey, in chronological fashion, of the major periods, authors and movements from Chaucer to the present. Written for undergraduate and postgraduate students in South Asian universities, this History locates authors, genres and developments within their social, political and historical contexts. Informed by contemporary literary and cultural theory, this account also prepares the student for further explorations in particular genres and periods in English literature. Key Features • A timeline and backgrounds chapter in each section to locate texts and writers in their social and political contexts • Additional information in boxes to draw attention to crucial 'moments' in the story of English literature • A revisionist reading of each period from new perspectives including feminism, new historicism and postcolonialism • An up-to-date bibliography and webliography to guide students to further specialized readings and introduce them to indispensable online resources • A detailed index of writers and their writings for easy reference and accessibility

A guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. The volume includes information on Old and Middle English, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian literature, Modernism, and post-war writing.