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'I write about love, I write about friendship,' remarked Thom Gunn:
'I find that they are absolutely intertwined.' These core values
permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and
fellow poets, and shed new light on 'one of the most singular and
compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (Times
Literary Supplement). These letters reveal the evolution of Gunn's
work and illuminate the fascinating life that informed his poems:
his struggle to come to terms with his mother's suicide; his
changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD
trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the
deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing
elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
William Morris had a lifelong fascination with illuminated books.
He collected thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts and
became one of the foremost experts on the art of bookmaking and
calligraphy. Aiming to resurrect a tradition that had fallen into
abeyance with the invention of printing, he made eighteen
illuminated books, using a variety of texts, during the course of
his life. One of these, now held in the Bodleian Library, is a
handmade edition of the Odes of Horace. The pages of this book,
reproduced here in high-quality facsimile, are among the most
intricate and ambitious that Morris ever created. Using a
Renaissance italic style of calligraphy, he illuminated letters
with delicate shades of gold and silver, and adorned them with
floral decoration and miniature faces and figures. The openings to
each of the four books of the Odes are stunning display pages on
which Morris collaborated with the artists Edward Burne-Jones and
Charles Fairfax Murray. The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) wrote four
books of lyric poetry in Latin which have subsequently been
translated many times and have had an ongoing influence on Western
literature. He combined descriptions of the everyday with the
poetry of politics, patriotism, love and friendship, producing
lines of beauty and wisdom which were very popular in Morris's day
and continue to appeal in the twenty-first century. This facsimile
edition is presented in a blind embossed slipcase featuring a
detail from one of Burne-Jones' paintings in the book with a
companion volume containing an introduction to William Morris's
manuscript and an English translation of the Odes.
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Selected Poems (Hardcover)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Edited by Clive Wilmer
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R2,678
Discovery Miles 26 780
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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For critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the great creative figures of the
day, a painter and a poet of major stature. Yeats and the young
Pound regarded him as an exemplary figure of solitary dedication to
art and beauty.
Rossetti's most original work may have been in preparing the way
for the modernists, who in turn dethroned him. He called the sonnet
'a moment's monument', and his best short lyrics are instants of
oppressed emotion cut free of time. In this, as in the
suggestiveness of his imagery, he anticipates the French
Symbolists. He can also be regarded as the founder of modern verse
translation, not only for the freshness of his versions but also
for his choice of poets---Villon, Cavalcanti and the young Dante.
In this selection, Clive Wilmer has made a personal choice,
emphasizing the 'pure poetry' of the lyrics at the expense of the
more conventionally Victorian monologues and narratives. He has
also included a generous selection from the translations, and
provided a biographical and critical introduction.
Clive Wilmer's fourth collection of poems. The elegies, colloquys,
meditations and passionate recollections learn from masters of
modernism such as Pessoa and Pound, and are all the time informed
by the prophetic voices of Morris and Ruskin.
William Morris was a dreamer with a genius for turning dreams into reality. Self-taught in thirteen different crafts, some of them ancient ones that had died out, he became the greatest European pattern-designer since the Middle Ages. He was, besides, a campaigning socialist and a pioneering environmentalist, a lyric poet and a forceful journalist, a storyteller and a maker of fine books. This volume illustrates the variety of Morris's prose, while focusing on one theme: the earthly paradise. The 'Nowhere' of News from Nowhere (1890) is England in 2102, an ideal pastoral society born out of revolution. It is as compelling a dream of the future as the nightmares of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhilaratingly, it reminds us that nothing is inevitable about the way we live - now or in 1890.
For critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the great creative figures of the
day, a painter and a poet of major stature. Yeats and the young
Pound regarded him as an exemplary figure of solitary dedication to
art and beauty. In this selection Clive Wilmer has made a personal
choice, emphasizing the 'pure poetry' of the lyrics at the expense
of the more conventionally Victorian monologues and narratives.
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