Recommendations based on "The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Paperbook)"

Whitman's most beloved poem, "Song of Myself," illustrated, illuminated, and presented like never before. Walt Whitman’s iconic collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, has earned a reputation as a sacred American text. Whitman himself made such comparisons, going so far as to use biblical verse as a model for his own. So it’s only appropriate that artist and illustrator Allen Crawford has chosen to illuminate―like medieval monks with their own holy scriptures―Whitman’s masterpiece and the core of his poetic vision, “Song of Myself.” Crawford has turned the original sixty-page poem from Whitman’s 1855 edition into a sprawling 234-page work of art. The handwritten text and illustrations intermingle in a way that’s both surprising and wholly in tune with the spirit of the poem―they’re exuberant, rough, and wild. Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is a sensational reading experience, an artifact in its own right, and a masterful tribute to the Good Gray Poet.

The essential poems of the inspirational thirteenth-century Persian philosopher, scholar and mysticThe founder of the order of the Whirling Dervishes, Rumi was also a poet of transcendental power. His verse speaks with the universal voice of the human soul and brims with exuberant energy and passion. Rich in natural imagery, from flowers to birds and rivers to stars, the poems have an elemental force that has remained undiminished through the centuries. Their themes - tolerance, goodness, the experience of God, charity and awareness through love - still resonate with millions of readers around the world.Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne is a testament to the love that inspired the passion and creativity of one of the greatest English Romantic poets. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Jane Campion, Oscar-winning director of the film Bright Star. John Keats died aged just twenty-five, leaving behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and love letters ever written, inspired by his great love for his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time apart - separated by Keats's worsening illness, which forced a move abroad - Keats wrote again and again about and to his love, right until his very last poem, called simply 'To Fanny'. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death. So Bright and Delicate contains the love poems and correspondence composed by Keats in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cruelly cut short. John Keats (1795-1821) lost both his parents at an early age. His decision to commit himself to poetry, rather than follow a career in medicine, was a personal challenge, unfounded in any prior success. His first volume of poetry, published in 1817, was a critical and commercial failure. During his short life he received little recognition, and it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism began to be understood, and not until this century that it became fully appreciated. If you enjoyed So Bright and Delicate, you might like Keats's Complete Poems, also available in Penguin Classics.

A major career-spanning collection from the inimitable Nobel Prize-winning poetFor the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest living poets.From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.

A collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, the classic companion to Gretel Ehrlich’s new book, Unsolaced“Wyoming has found its Whitman.” —Annie DillardPoet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life.Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces—the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons—in the remote reaches of the American West. She brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists. Together, these essays form an evocative and vibrant tribute to the life Ehrlich chose and the geography she loves.Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning” (Newsday), Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us.

This Norton Critical Edition presents the work of one of America's foremost poets. It moves well beyond the scope of its predecessor, Adrienne Rich's Poetry (1975), in giving proper recognition to Rich's extraordinary achievements in both poetry and prose in recent years. The result is a judiciously edited, sensibly annotated volume ideally suited for classroom study of one of our most distinguished working writers. In both poetry and prose, the editors have chosen selections intended to give readers a clear sense of Rich's evolution and accomplishment. Many of the poems in this expanded collection are from Rich's five recent volumes―The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991). Prose selections include "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Rich's canonical statement on feminism; "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," on being a lesbian in a heterosexual world; Rich's interview for American Poetry Review, which presents a full and frank discussion of her work; and her previously unpublished commentary on the genesis of the poem "Yom Kippur 1984."The editors have also taken into account the many essays on Rich and reviews of her work that have been published since 1975. Some earlier biographical selections have been replaced with works that focus on the quality of Rich's writing and her place in twentieth-century American literature―not just as a poet, but as a woman, a lesbian, and a mother. Criticism includes thirteen reviews and interpretations of Rich's work by W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Helen Vendler, Judith McDaniel, Adrian Oktenberg, Charles Altieri, and Joanna Feit Diehl, among others. A second recent study by Albert Gelpi traces the events in Rich's life from which her work evolves. An updated Chronology and Selected Bibliography, as well as an expanded Index, are included.

One of The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2024 "Atmospheric and intoxicating, lyrical and inviting, The Wickedest is a heady night in the dance, and Caleb Femi is the life of the literary party." —Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie “Caleb Femi is a gift to us all from the storytelling gods. He is a poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy.” —Max Porter, author of Shy An immersive epic taking place over one night at an underground London house party, conjured by a multi-hyphenate sensation. Welcome to the Wickedest, the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot. You better hope you have the address: this is for locals only. Sweaty and cinematic, pulsing with rhythm and heat, every moment here—from one-on-one intimacies to the swell of the party’s collective roar—is refracted in Caleb Femi’s writing. Ingeniously blending conversations, text messages, sonnets, vignettes, monologues, photos, and lyrics, The Wickedest is a modern epic, told as a minute-by-minute chronicle of an unforgettable night out. Femi, a multi-hyphenate sensation and the author of Poor, which was called “a landmark debut for British poetry” by The Guardian, is a generational storyteller and scene setter. But The Wickedest does more than tell the story of one party; Femi uses the experience of nightlife to document the broader contexts surrounding the shoobs—the marginalization of low-income communities of color, the red tape that bars those on the edges from already shrinking communal space. Still, the party goes on. The Wickedest is a respite and a reckoning, a community of desire, care, and resistance that carries on long past the night’s end.

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader."I celebrate myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass."So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literature.The publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 was a landmark event in literary history. Ralph Waldo Emerson judged the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." Nothing like the volume had ever appeared before. Everything about it--the unusual jacket and title page, the exuberant preface, the twelve free-flowing, untitled poems embracing every realm of experience--was new. The 1855 edition broke new ground in its relaxed style, which prefigured free verse; in its sexual candor; in its images of racial bonding and democratic togetherness; and in the intensity of its affirmation of the sanctity of the physical world.This Anniversary Edition captures the typeface, design and layout of the original edition supervised by Whitman himself. Today's readers get a sense of the "ur-text" of Leaves of Grass, the first version of this historic volume, before Whitman made many revisions of both format and style. The volume also boasts an afterword by Whitman authority David Reynolds, in which he discusses the 1855 edition in its social and cultural contexts: its background, its reception, and its contributions to literary history. There is also an appendix containing the early responses to the volume, including Emerson's letter, Whitman's three self-reviews, and the twenty other known reviews published in various newspapers and magazines.This special volume will be a must-have keepsake for fans of Whitman and lovers of American poetry.

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a "spoken" text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

This book of poems has the cumulative impact of a good novel. It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight formal structure, and brilliantly effective imagery. But she makes her singular claim on our attention by the fact that she has important things to tell us and tells them dramatically.