'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.

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.

The most influential art theorist and critic of his age, an outstanding man of letters, a sensitive painter and draughtsman, Ruskin's social criticism shocked and angered the establishment and many of his admirers. First and foremost an outcry against injustice and inhumanity, Unto this Last is also a closely argued assault on the science of political economy, which dominated the Victorian period. Ruskin was a profoundly conservative man who looked back to the Middle Ages as a Utopia, yet his ideas had a considerable influence on the British socialist movement. And in making his powerful moral and aesthetic case against the dangers of unhindered industrialization he was strangely prophetic. This volume shows the astounding range and depth of Ruskin's work, and in an illuminating introduction the editor reveals the consistency of Ruskin's philosophy and his adamant belief that questions of economics, art and science could not be separated from questions of morality. In Ruskin's words, 'There is no Wealth but Life.'

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.