A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet. During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body of poems that range from the exquisite to the obsene, while simultaneously living a life of dissolute excess with his lover and fellow poet, Verlaine. At the age of 21, he abandonned poetry and travelled across Europe before settling in Africa as an arms trader. This edition sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a sparkling translation of his most exhilarating poetry and a generous selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.

Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology. As an "honored courtesan", Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers—merchants, ambassadors, even kings—who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and manners, and elegant, cultivated conversationalists. Exempt from many of the social and educational restrictions placed on women of the Venetian patrician class, Franco used her position to recast "virtue" as "intellectual integrity," offering wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life. Franco became a writer by allying herself with distinguished men at the center of her city's culture, particularly in the informal meetings of a literary salon at the home of Domenico Venier, the oldest member of a noble family and a former Venetian senator. Through Venier's protection and her own determination, Franco published work in which she defended her fellow courtesans, speaking out against their mistreatment by men and criticizing the subordination of women in general. Venier also provided literary counsel when she responded to insulting attacks written by the male Venetian poet Maffio Venier. Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries make her life and work pertinent today.

The books in this A Level poetry series contain a glossary and notes on each page. The approach encourages students to develop their own responses to the poems, and an A Level Chief Examiner offers exam tips. This text contains poems and letters by Keats in chronological order.

This selection of poetry and prose by Ghalib provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the preeminent Urdu poet of the nineteenth century. Ghalib's poems, especially his ghazals, remain beloved throughout South Asia for their arresting intelligence and lively wit. His letters—informal, humorous, and deeply personal—reveal the vigor of his prose style and the warmth of his friendships. These careful translations allow readers with little or no knowledge of Urdu to appreciate the wide range of Ghalib's poetry, from his gift for extreme simplicity to his taste for unresolvable complexities of structure. Beginning with a critical introduction for nonspecialists and specialists alike, Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall present a selection of Ghalib's works, carefully annotating details of poetic form. Their translation maintains line-for-line accuracy and thereby preserves complex poetic devices that play upon the tension between the two lines of each verse. The book includes whole ghazals, selected individual verses from other ghazals, poems in other genres, and letters. The book also includes a glossary, the Urdu text of the original poetry, and an appendix containing Ghalib's comments on his own verses.

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

The iconic Renaissance painter and sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a prolific and gifted poet. This groundbreaking collection presents verses, intense and passionate, that capture Michelangelo's eroticism and spirituality, alongside letters that provide fascinating insight into his family relations and day-to-day life as a working artist. The result is a revealing portrait of a towering figure of the Renaissance. --Penguin Press.

For Charles Olson, letters were not only a daily means of communication with friends but were at the same time a vehicle for exploratory thought. In fact, many of Olson's finest works, including Projective Verse and the Maximus Poems, were formulated as letters. Olson's letters are important to an understanding of his definition of the postmodern, and through the play of mind exhibited here we recognize him as one of the vital thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume, edited and annotated by Ralph Maud, we see Olson at the height of his powers and also at his most human. Nearly 200 letters, selected from a known 3,000, demonstrate the wide range of Olson's interests and the depth of his concern for the future. Maud includes letters to friends and loved ones, job and grant applications, letters of recommendation, and Black Mountain College business letters, as well as correspondence illuminating Olson's poetics. As we read through the letters, which span the years from 1931, when Olson was an undergraduate, to his death in 1970, a fascinating portrait of this complex poet and thinker emerges.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Translated by Christopher Middleton. Although he received little recognition during his lifetime, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) has come to be considered one of Europe's greatest poets. His visionary work--at once local and cosmic--has influenced such figures as Rilke, Heidegger, Celan, and Cixous. This bilingual volume contains translations of thirty-one poems and fourteen letters, as well as an Introduction, Notes, and commentary by the highly regarded poet and translator Christopher Middleton. "This is an extraordinarily rich and powerful selected assemblage of Hölderlin's writings--poems and also letters--bilingual and translated with intense inwardness, situated by accompanying commentary and discussion in both the historical contingency of the poet's Lebenswelt and at the same time in his passional spirit-thinking as it evolves and informs his poetical experiments. There have been many previous versions into English of the most celebrated of these poems, but these here come unmistakably from the imaginative intelligence of another strenuously original poet, at exceedingly close connection with Hölderlin's wrestle with language, its upward reach into the fleeting semi-permanence of the divine presences and its probing downwards into the Germanistic roots of a language-culture at this time in historical and political turbulence. Middleton's full and thorough-going Introduction pre-empts earlier (and later) translation dalliance with spirit-fancy by his rigorous and persistent precision."--J.H. Prynne

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably. Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man. Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.