Complete Poems

Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Despite his tragically short life, John Keats, a self-confessed “rebel Angel”, endures for many as a personification of the Romantic age. While contemporary critics mocked him as a “Cockney poet” and an uneducated lower-class “apothecary” who aspired to poetry, subsequent generations began to see and appreciate both the rich and impassioned sensuousness and the love of beauty and liberty that pervade his work. From Endymion and Hyperion to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the Odes, this collection, which presents Keats’s oeuvre in chronological order, displays his rapid poetic growth, the development of his philosophical and spiritual beliefs and the voluptuous, silken nature of his verse.

Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Despite his tragically short life, John Keats, a self-confessed “rebel Angel”, endures for many as a personification of the Romantic age. While contemporary critics mocked him as a “Cockney poet” and an uneducated lower-class “apothecary” who aspired to poetry, subsequent generations began to see and appreciate both the rich and impassioned sensuousness and the love of beauty and liberty that pervade his work. From Endymion and Hyperion to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the Odes, this collection, which presents Keats’s oeuvre in chronological order, displays his rapid poetic growth, the development of his philosophical and spiritual beliefs and the voluptuous, silken nature of his verse.

Best remembered as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the fabled Jazz Age literay coterie, Dorothy Parker built a reputations as one of the era's most beloved poets. Parker's satirical wit and sharp-edged humour earned her a reputation as the wittiest woman in America. This Penguin Classics edition of her poetry - the companion to Parker's Complete Stories and introduced by her noted biographer, Marion Meade - is the only complete collection available, showcasing the dry quips and piercingly introspective verse of a writer whose legend continues to fascinate.

Best remembered as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the fabled Jazz Age literay coterie, Dorothy Parker built a reputations as one of the era's most beloved poets. Parker's satirical wit and sharp-edged humour earned her a reputation as the wittiest woman in America. This Penguin Classics edition of her poetry - the companion to Parker's Complete Stories and introduced by her noted biographer, Marion Meade - is the only complete collection available, showcasing the dry quips and piercingly introspective verse of a writer whose legend continues to fascinate.

When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today she is regarded as Finland’s greatest modern poet. Her poems – written in Swedish – are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud’s, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular. Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran’s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923. Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and ?nally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world – imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction. David McDuff’s edition was the first complete translation into English of Edith Södergran’s Swedish poetry. His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original. In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Södergran’s life and work.

The startling originality of Emily Dickinson's style condemned her poetry to obscurity during her lifetime, but her bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations have since won her international recognition as a poet of the highest order. The Complete Poems is the only one-volume edition containing all of Emily Dickinson's verse. In this landmark edition, the editor, Thomas H. Johnson, has presented the poems in their original contexts; and where alternate readings were suggested, he has chosen only those which the poet evidently preferred. His introduction includes a brief explanation of his selection of texts as well as an outline of Emily Dickinson's career.

The startling originality of Emily Dickinson's style condemned her poetry to obscurity during her lifetime, but her bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations have since won her international recognition as a poet of the highest order. The Complete Poems is the only one-volume edition containing all of Emily Dickinson's verse. In this landmark edition, the editor, Thomas H. Johnson, has presented the poems in their original contexts; and where alternate readings were suggested, he has chosen only those which the poet evidently preferred. His introduction includes a brief explanation of his selection of texts as well as an outline of Emily Dickinson's career.

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. The citation declares, 'his lyrical poetry with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time'. Jack Bevan's authoritative translation of Quasimodo life work fills a great gap in our knowledge of twentieth-century European poetry. 'The poetry is textured like shot silk, yet the elegance and syntactical lucidity with which Jack Bevan has worked to bring these poems to English readers enables them to stand as poems in their own right,' wrote Peter Scupham of Bevan's translation of Quasimodo's last poems, Debit and Credit. Quasimodo's strong and passionate writing continues to testify to the human – and inhuman – realities which have created our modern world. The Italian critic Giuliano Dego wrote, 'To bear witness to man's history in all the urgency of a particular time and place, and to teach the lesson of courage, this has been Quasimodo’s poetic task.'

Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form. This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry. Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures. The directness and clarity of her lyrics still have the power to startle us with their truth and beauty.

Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form. This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry. Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures. The directness and clarity of her lyrics still have the power to startle us with their truth and beauty.