When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer. This rich cross-section of his work includes poems from throughout Whitman's lifetime as published on his deathbed edition of 1891, short stories, his prefaces to the many editions of "Leaves of Grass," and a variety of prose selections, including "Democratic Vistas, Specimen Days," and "Slang in America."

Longfellow was the most popular poet of his day. This selection includes generous samplings from his longer works—Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Hiawatha—as well as his shorter lyrics and less familiar narrative poems.

The only select volume of Emily Dickinson's poetry that truly represents the complete range of her work: 576 poems selected by the pre-eminent Dickinson scholar in America from the 1,1775 poems that form the body of her work.

The only one-volume edition containing all 1,775 of Emily Dickinson's poems

Only eleven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumously published collections -- some of them featuring liberally "edited" versions of the poems -- did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson's bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson's extraordinary poetic genius.

This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.

"With its chronological arrangement of the poems this volume becomes more than just a collection; it is at the same time a poetic biography of the thoughts and feelings of a woman whose beauty was deep and lasting."
-San Francisco Chronicle

This deluxe 150th anniversary edition of Whitman's masterwork features the complete text of the 1855 poem in its original and complete form, with a specially commissioned introductory essay by bestselling critic Harold Bloom.

Schmidgall, author of Walt Whitman: A Gay Life and several other studies, delivers an edition of Whitman that, at long last, lives up to the poet’s initial intentions. This new volume presents over 200 poems in their original form and chronology, thereby retrieving the candor and exuberance Whitman displayed in the creative and sexual prime of his life. Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892 also includes the poet’s major prose discussions of his verse, his four elegies for Lincoln, his earliest poems, and many contemporary—and sometimes blistering—reviews of his fearless, explicit, and uncompromised work.

Edwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns, the tyranny of love, and unspoken, unnoticed suffering. The fictional characters he created in 'Reuben Bright', 'Miniver Cheery', and 'Richard Cory' and the historical figures he brought to life - Lincoln in 'The Master' and the great painter in 'Rembrandt to Rembrandt' - harbour demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to a new generation of readers.

Chronically impoverished, tormented by self-doubt and a crippling addiction to opium, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) still managed to become one of the most versatile and influential forces of English romanticism.

The Portable Coleridge faithfully represents all facets of this complex, haunted genius, including his poems, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "Dejection"; letters to friends and colleagues such as Robert Southey and William Godwin; selections from Notebooks and Table Talk; political and philisophical writings; literary criticism; and extensive excerpts from Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge interweaves aesthetics, metaphysics, and disarmingly candid autobiography. Edited and with an introduction by the critic I.A. Richards, this voulme vastly expands our understanding of a writer of visionary insight and protean range.

The Portable Blake contains the hermetic genius's most important works: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in their entirety; selections from his "prophetic books"—including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Abion, America, The Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas—and from other works of poetry and prose, as well as the complete drawings for The Book of Job.