The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Love Songs and Sonnets includes Ronsard's famous sonnets to Helene, Dorothy Parker's sardonic reflections on men and Anne Bradstreet's touching poem "To my Husband." Shakespeare is here, of course, and Burnas, whose comparison of his love to a red, red rose remains one of the most celebrated of all poetic similes. This edition also includes a variety of delights by everyone from Thomas Wyatt to Langston Hughes, from Aphra Behn to John Updike. With a Foreword by Peter Washington, and an index of first lines.

A Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in this collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets This hilarious book of poetry transforms disco staples, classic rock anthems, and recent chart-toppers into hilarious iambic pentameter! All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. An entertaining journey into the world of Elizabethan poetry, and based on the immensely popular Tumblr of the same name, Pop Sonnets is the perfect gift for Shakespeare fans and music lovers alike. “Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can't get enough.” —TIME

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just to say "I love you!" Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: "today our bodies became vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor...." Written on the paradisal island of Capri, where Neruda "took refuge" in the arms of his lover Matilde Urrutia, Love Poems embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. This wonderful book collects Neruda’s most passionate verses.

Uncovers the unexplored history of the love song, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day, and discusses such topics as censorship, the legacy of love songs, and why it is a dominant form of modern musical expression.

In a series of representative case studies, Marianne Van Remoortel traces the development of the sonnet during intense moments of change and stability, continuity and conflict, from the early Romantic period to the end of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the role of the popular press, which served as a venue of innovation and as a site of recruitment for aspiring authors, Van Remoortel redefines the scope of the genre, including the ways in which its development is intricately related to issues of gender. Among her subjects are the Della Cruscans and their primary critic William Gifford, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, George Meredith's Modern Love, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter. As women became a force to be reckoned with among the reading public and the writing community, the term 'sonnet' often operated as a satirical label that was not restricted to poetry adhering to the strict formalities of the genre. Van Remoortel's study, in its attentiveness to the sonnet's feminization during the late eighteenth century, offers important insights into the ways in which changing attitudes about gender and genre shaped critics' interpretations of the reception histories of nineteenth-century sonnet sequences.

There may be no finer edition of Donne's Songs and Sonets than Redpath's annotated volume. Out of print for a decade, it is reprinted here in its second, revised edition. The book's twofold origin is evident on every page of commentary: it arises partly from a life of scholarship and partly from Redpath's experiences as a teacher.

Let Us Go Then, You and I is a new edition of T. S. Eliot's selected poems, published to celebrate his nomination as the 'Nation's Favourite Poet' in a BBC poll for National Poetry Day 2009.