Synopses & Reviews
Immortal Poems Here is the most inclusive anthology of verse ever published at so low a price. It contains not only the best-known works of the British and American masters but also the verse of the most brillant poets of our own day. Oscar Williams, who compiled Immortal Poems, was a distinguished editor and poet in his own right, of whom Robert Lowell wrote in the Sewanee Review: "Mr. Williams is probably the best anthologist in America today."
Synopsis
A timeless and comprehensive anthology of enduring English language poetry, featuring entries from 150 British and American poets, including Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Emily Dickinson. The last six hundred years in British and American literature have given us some of the most moving and memorable poems in all literature. Now, discover many of these same works in one gorgeously wrought collection, featuring entries from poets as legendary and beloved as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Waldo Emerson, D.H. Lawrence, and many more.
From Lewis Carroll's "Jabberywocky" to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and from Shakespeare's sonnets to anonymous classics, this is the ultimate gift for poetry lovers of all ages and backgrounds. Arranged chronologically, the 150 poems featured in this stunning collection reflect the immortality of the poetic soul.
About the Author
Oscar Williams (1900-1964), editor of this book, was himself a distinguished poet. The author of five books of poetry, including
That's All That Matters and
Selected Poems, he has been called "clever, disconcerting, rash" (Lionel Abel) and "a very real and important poet...(whose) powerful imagery and unique personal idiom will add a permanent page to American poetry" (Dylan Thomas).
Mr. Williams achieved literary distinction not only as a highly original and vigorous American poet, but also as one of the great poetry anthologists of his time. His most outstanding anthologies are "The Little Treasury Series," The War Poets, Immortal Poems of the English Language, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse and The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, the latter three published by Pocket Books. These are accepted as present-day classics in their fields and are in wide use in colleges and universities. Other anthologies include a revised edition of Palgrave's The Golden Treasury, The Major British Poets, The Major American Poets, and The Silver Treasury of Light Verse.
Mr. Williams' last and most ambitious anthology was Master Poems of the English Language, now also published by Pocket Books. A huge work of over 1100 pages, illustrated with portraits of the poets and combining a comprehensive anthology with a broad sampling of critical writing, it is a superb contribution by the man Robert Lowell called "probably the best anthologist in America."
Table of Contents
CONTENTSGeoffrey Chaucer
John Skelton
Anonymous: Songs & Ballads
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Edward Dyer
Edmund Spenser
George Peele
Samuel Daniel
Michael Drayton
Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Campion
Ben Jonson
John Donne
John Webster
Robert Herrick
George Herbert
James Shirley
Thomas Carew
Edmund Waller
John Milton
Sir John Suckling
William Cartwright
Richard Crashaw
Richard Lovelace
Abraham Cowley
Andrew Marvell
Henry Vaughan
John Dryden
Thomas Traherne
William Douglas
George Berkeley
John Gay
Alexander Pope
William Oldys
Thomas Gray
William Collins
Christopher Smart
Oliver Goldsmith
William Cowper
Thomas Chatterton
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thomas Campbell
Walter Savage Landor
Thomas Moore
Leigh Hunt
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
William Cullen Bryant
John Keats
Thomas Hood
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
John Greenleaf Whittier
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edward FitzGerald
Edgar Allan Poe
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Robert Browning
Edward Lear
Emily Brontë
James Russell Lowell
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Charles Kingsley
Arthur Hugh Clough
Julia Ward Howe
Matthew Arnold
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
George Meredith
Christina Rossetti
Emily Dickinson
Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson)
Sir W. S. Gilbert
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thomas Hardy
Sidney Lanier
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Robert Bridges
William Ernest Henley
Francis Thompson
John Davidson
A. E. Housman
George Santayana
William Butler Yeats
Rudyard Kipling
Ernest Dowson
Edgar Lee Masters
Edwin Arlington Robinson
W. H. Davies
Walter De La Mare
Robert Frost
John Masefield
Sarah N. Cleghorn
Carl Sandburg
Harold Monro
Vachel Lindsay
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Elinor Wylie
D. H. Lawrence
Ezra Pound
Rupert Brooke
Robinson Jeffers
Edwin Muir
Marianne Moore
Thomas Stearns Eliot
John Crowe Ransom
Conrad Aiken
Edna St. Vincent Millay
John Peale Bishop
Archibald MacLeish
Wilfred Owen
E. E. Cummings
Robert Graves
F. R. Higgins
Allen Tate
Hart Crane
Oscar Williams
Ogden Nash
C. Day Lewis
Richard Eberhart
Peter Quennell
Esther Mathews
William Empson
Vernon Watkins
W. H. Auden
Louis MacNeice
Stephen Spender
Alfred Hayes
W. R. Rodgers
Elizabeth Bishop
Lawrence Durrell
F. T. Prince
Delmore Schwartz
Karl Shapiro
George Barker
Henry Reed
John Manifold
Robert Lowell
Gene Derwood
Dylan Thomas
Index of First Lines
Index of Authors and Titles