It is often said that Rumi (aka Jalal al-Din, 1207-73) is now the most popular poet in the United States. This conquest of the new world by a middle-eastern medieval writer who died before Chaucer was even born has been achieved with extraordinary speed in less than thirty years.The main key to Rumi's success is the spiritual appeal of his work. It combines lyrical beauty with philosophical profundity, a sense of rapture and an acute awareness of human suffering in ways which speak directly to contemporary audiences. Like the metaphysical poets, Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Rumi yokes together everyday images with complex ideas. He talks about divine love in vivid human terms. As a religious teacher of the Dervish order, he expounds the mystical doctrines of Sufism which focus on the notion of union with the Beloved to whom many of the poems are addressed. Persian poetry of this period is not easy to translate. In order to give the greatest possible access to a wonderful poet this selection draws on avariety of translations from the early 20th century to the present, ranging from scholarly renderings to free interpretations.

Once confined to a literary elite in Japan, haiku are now written all over the world by poets who find their combination of brevity, technical discipline and expressive content irresistible. This collection brings together hundreds of poems by Japanese writers from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, with modern examples from Europe and America. In addition, there is a selection of poems influenced by haiku, and a section devoted to haiku-like passages from traditional English poets. The book is dominated by four great masters - Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki - who between them compress the gamut of human experience into the limits of seventeen syllables.

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic.
The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic.
The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.

In this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the Pickwick Club: Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle, the portly innocent embarks on a series of hilariously comic adventures. But can Pickwick retain his good will towards his fellow humans once he discovers the evils of the world?
Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, "The Pickwick Papers," catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836-37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief.
Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens's burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors' prisons.
As G. K. Chesterton noted, "Before Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick."
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

This is the fourth volume in the series of Everyman Pocket Poet Love Poems, following the success of Love poems, Erotic Poems and Love Letters. LOVE SONGS AND SONNETS takes a wider view of love, covering all aspects of human relationships, from passionate first love to fianl regret. Includes poems by Shakespere, Donne, Dickinson, Lowell. Larkin, Herbet, Horace, Hardy, Rilke, Auden and Burns - and many more. Published in good time for Valentine's Day 1997.

Ever since Pushkin, Russian poets have been famous for their ability to combine private and public experience in lyric poetry of a comprehensiveness and intensity unmatched elsewhere. Ranging in extremes from the melting tenderness of unrequited love to the bitter comedy of political chaos, this collection of poems covering two centuries includes work by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, Annensky,Mayakovsky, Bely, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky and others less celebrated but no less extraordinary. The text is divided into six sections. Russian poets constantly reflect on their art, so the first section is appropriately entitled 'The Muse'. Their other great topic is Russia herself, explored in parts two and three. Part four presents the inner world, parts five and six traditional themes of love and mortality. Poetry has often been a matter of life and death in Russia, where Mandelstam was not the only poet to perish in the Gulag. The comfortable private domain familiar to many English and American writers barely exists in a country where political realities are exigent - one reason for the fierce intensity found in so many of these poems.

Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.


From the Paperback edition.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)"The Age of Innocence," one of Edith Wharton's most renowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York.The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May's disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty. Wharton's profound understanding of her characters' lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, "The Age of Innocence" is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works.With an introduction by Peter Washington

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.
Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one's own experience. From the embattled farmers who "fired the shot heard round the world" in the stirring "Concord Hymn," to the flower in "The Rhodora," whose existence demonstrates "that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being," Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature.
Combining intensity of feeling with his famous idealism, Emerson's poems reveal a moving, more intimate side of the man revered as the Sage of Concord.

This beloved novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress, the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest of his life to tracking down and punishing the enemies who wronged him.

Though a brilliant storyteller, Dumas was given to repetitions and redundancies; this slightly streamlined version of the original 1846 English translation speeds the narrative flow while retaining most of the rich pictorial descriptions and all the essential details of Dumas's intricately plotted and thrilling masterpiece.
Alexandre Dumas's epic novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery--one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written--in a newly revised translation.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel is in many ways his most intriguing. A highly atmospheric tale of murder, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" foreshadows both the detective stories of Conan Doyle and the nightmarish novels of Kafka.
As in many of Dickens's greatest novels, the gulf between appearance and reality drives the action. Set in the seemingly innocuous cathedral town of Cloisterham, the story rapidly darkens with a sense of impending evil. Central to the plot is John Jasper: in public he is a man of integrity and benevolence; in private he is an opium addict. And while seeming to smile on the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, he is, in fact, consumed by jealousy, driven to terrify the boy's fiancee and to plot the murder of Edwin himself. Though "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" is one of its author's darkest books, it also bustles with a vast roster of memorable-and delightfully named-minor characters: Mrs. Billikins, the landlady; the foolish Mr. Sapsea; the domineering philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder; and the mysterious Datchery. Several attempts have been made over the years to complete the novel and solve the mystery, but even in its unfinished state it is a gripping and haunting masterpiece.

The great Roman poets of Antiquity wrote some of the most compelling lyrical poetry of all time, to be read privately but also on occasion to be performed publicly on the field of victory, at a banquet or at a public festival. With a freshness that belie the nearly two thousand years that separate us Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Propertius and Catullus write movingly of the pleasures of love, of wine, of nature and the joys of pastoral life, a city and its contrasts, of friendship and of death. This edition brings together an exceptional selection with translations by Christpoher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Robert Herrick, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Alfred Tennyson, A. E. Houseman and Rudyard Kipling. This edition is illustrated with the magnificent classical engravings of Johannes Pine's great edition of Horace of 1737. Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today. Horace's ode iii, tr. by John Dryen

Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people's lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Poems of Food and Drink abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations - in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plath's ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in 'Blackberrying' to D. H. Lawrence's lush celebration of 'Figs', from the civilized comfort of Noel Coward's 'Something on a Tray' to the salacious provocation of Swift's 'Oysters', from Li Po on 'Drinking Alone' to Baudelaire on 'The Soul of the Wine', and from Emily Dickinson's 'Forbidden Fruit' to Elizabeth Bishop's 'A Miracle for Breakfast', Poems of Food and Drink serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.

A new anthology of classic ghost stories--the second volume in the beautiful and collectible Pocket Classics format.
The chilling classic stories gathered here offer a remarkable variety of approaches to the theme of haunting. Revenge comes from beyond the grave in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body-Snatcher," while visions of the dead come between the living in Henry James's "The Friends of the Friends." P. G. Wodehouse gives us a farcical take on the haunted house in "Honeysuckle Cottage," and in L. P. Hartley's "W.S.," a writer is fatally stalked by his own aggrieved creation.
Here are ghosts of every stripe and intent in stories from writers as varied as Elizabeth Bowen and Jorge Luis Borges, Eudora Welty and Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury and Edith Wharton, among others. In the hands of these masters, the ghost story ranges far beyond mere horror to encompass comedy and tragedy, pathos and drama, and even a touch of poetry.

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a more complex writer than his status as Queen Victoria's favorite poet might suggest. Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and to Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries. And though he treasured poetic tradition, his work nevertheless engaged directly with the great issues of his time, from industrialization and the crisis of faith to scientific progress and women's rights. A master of the short, intense lyric, he can also be sardonic, humorous, voluptuous, earthy, and satirical.
This collection includes, of course, such celebrated poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade." There are extracts from all the major masterpieces--"Idylls of the King," "The Princess," "In Memoriam"--and several complete long poems, such as "Ulysses" and "Demeter and Persephone," that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as "Come into the Garden, Maud" and "Break, Break, Break," for which he is justly celebrated.

These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Blake contains a full selection of Blake's work, including Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, poems from Blake's Ms. book, poems from The Prophetic Books, and an index of first lines.

Simple yet capable of great complexity, the haiku is a tightly structured verse form that has a remarkable power to distill the essence of a moment keenly perceived. For centuries confined to a small literary elite in Japan, the writing of haiku is now practiced all over the world by those who are fascinated by its combination of technical challenge, expressive means, and extreme concentration.

This anthology brings together hundreds of haiku by the Japanese masters—Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki—with superb examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. The pioneering translator R. H. Blyth believed that the spirit of haiku is present in all great poetry; inspired by him, the editor of this volume has included lines from such poets as Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Thoreau, and Hopkins, presented here in haiku form. Following them are haiku and haiku-influenced poems of the twentieth century—from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” to William Carlos Williams’s “Prelude to Winter,” and from the irreverence of Jack Kerouac to the lyricism of Richard Wright. The result is a collection as compact, dynamic, and scintillating as the form itself.

Poe's poems have been memorized and recited by millions. Among his best-loved works are "The Raven" with its hypnotic chant of "nevermore, " and the sensuous and lyrical "Annabel Lee." This collection includes all of Poe's most popular rhymes.

Celebrated in their time and still popular over a century after their deaths, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had a unique relationship which is reflected in their work. Both were distinguished as poets before they met, and they learnt from one another without ever sacrificing their individuality. If Elizabeth recognized that Robert's talent was the greater of the two, Robert understood that his wife's voice was unique. All the great themes they shared are represented in this collection of their shorter poems - love, marriage, poetry, religion, England and Italy, the natural world - and the poems are accompanied by a selection from the marvellous letters they wrote to one another, especially in the years of their courtship. Among the items included are extracts from Aurora Leigh and Pauline, and the whole of Sonnets from the Portuguese, together with many lyrics and narrative poems by both poets.

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS, we have assembled a wide range erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.