The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition.

Since 1936, the New Directions in Prose and Poetry anthologies have served as vehicles for the presentation of new and variant trends in world literature.

Ezra Pound has been called "the inventor of modern poetry in English." The verse and criticism which he produced during the early years of the twentieth century very largely determined the directions of creative writing in our time; virtually every major poet in England and America today has acknowledged his help or influence. Pound's lyric genius, his superb technique, and his fresh insight into literary problems make him one of the small company of men who through the centuries have kept poetry alive—one of the great innovators. This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works—the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem.

Imaginations makes accessible to the broad reading public live early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for Kora in Hell, have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms. Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.” The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

Provides translations of more than two hundred-fifty poems by over forty poets, from early anonymous poetry through the T'ang and Sung dynasties.

The poets are presented in ample selections so that each may be heard clearly, and biographical and bibliographical notes invite further investigation. From cover to cover, themes ebb and flow and boundaries blur as verses converse in a harmony unusual for the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.