A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

447 British and American poems by 150 poets, including contemporary poets.

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was the author of ten novels, a play, and a host of innovative educational books for children, as well as several volumes of poetry that helped set priorities and determine the tastes of the culture of early Romanticism. Her Elegiac Sonnets sparked the sonnet revival in English Romanticism; The Emigrants initiated its passion for lengthy meditative introspection; and Beachy Head lent its poetic engagement with nature a uniquely telling immediacy. Smith was a woman, Wordsworth remarked a quarter century after her death, "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered." True to his prediction, Smith's poetry has virtually dropped from sight and thus from cultural consciousness. This, the first edition of Smith's collected poems, will restore to all students of English poetry a distinctive, compelling voice. Likewise, the recovery of Smith to her rightful place among the Romantic poets must spur the reassessment of the place of women writers within that culture.

Blake occupies a very special place in the pantheon of English Romanticism: just as innovative and brilliant as a painter and draughtsman as in the field of poetry, he created works that are often difficult to categorize and that, while harking back to a classical and biblical past, also look forward to the future – with authors such as T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and the Beat poets among his many modern admirers. This volume includes an essential selection of Blake's poetry, from the lesser-known Poetical Sketches to his celebrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the “prophetic works” inspired by the French Revolution, covering over two decades of poetical activity and displaying the author's originality and independence of mind at their sparkling best.

Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith’s major poetic works are foundational texts of the Romantic period. Smith’s innovations in poetic form have also placed her at the forefront of twenty-first-century scholarship on the period. This edition presents her three major poetic works—Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800), The Emigrants (1793), and Beachy Head (1807). While the significance of these three volumes of poetry was recognized in their own time, this edition suggests that they remain major texts for thinking through such questions as the relationship between public and private; the ethical treatment of refugees and other persecuted people; the position of women in a patriarchal society; and the usefulness of science as a way of making sense of a complex and ever-changing world. This Broadview edition includes a new critical introduction that takes into account the developments in scholarship on Smith’s work and women’s writing over the past three decades, and it provides readers with a wealth of contextual material for understanding the writer and the social and literary environment within which she wrote, including key works by her precursors and contemporaries, selections from her letters, and reviews of her poetry.