This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.

A beautiful Christmas gift hardback celebrating the best of the Faber and Faber archive.

The winter landscape at Christmas, the story of the Nativity, the celebrations of the season, and the coming of the New Year-these are explored through more than 120 poems, both old and new. Included in this wonderful illustrated collection are poems by Ted Hughes, John Betjeman, W.H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Michael Rosen, and many more.

T. S. Eliot once stated that the supreme poet "in writing himself, writes his time". In saying that, he honoured Dante and Shakespeare, but this pithy remark fittingly characterises his own work, including The Ariel Poems, with which he promptly and pointedly responded to the problems of his times. Published with unwavering regularity, a poem a year, the Ariels were composed in the period when Eliot was mainly writing prose; and, like his prose, they reverberated with diverse contemporary issues ranging from the revision of the Book of Common Prayer to the translations of Heidegger to the questions of leadership and populism. In order to highlight the poems' historical specificity, this study seeks to outline the constellations of thought connecting Eliot’s poetry and prose. In addition, it attempts to expose the Ariels’ shared arc of meaning, an unobtrusive incarnational metaphor determining the perspective from which they propose an unorthodox understanding of the epoch— an underlying pattern of thought bringing them together into a conceptually discrete set. This is the first study that both universalizes and historicises the series, striving to disclose the regular without suppressing the random. Approaching the series as a system of orderly disorder, the notion very much at home with chaos theory, it suggests new intellectual contexts, offering interpretations that are either fresh, or significantly reangled.

The first critical edition of Auden's only explicitly religious long poem For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most clichéd of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.

A collection of poems, some of which had first appeared in Poetry, Blas, Others, The Little Review, and Arts and Letters.

For a decade, while she was Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy gifted her thousands of readers an illustrated poem every Christmas, transporting them in one year to a seventeenth-century festival on the frozen Thames, in another to Western Front to witness the famous 1914 truce, then to a sweet winter's night in the South of France with Pablo Picasso and his small dog. Christmas Poems showcases Duffy's bold and innovative voice, alongside gorgeous artwork from Rob Ryan, David De Las Heras and Lara Hawthorne, amongst others. These ten much-loved poems are gathered together for the first time in this compendium to make a perfect gift for old friends celebrating a decade's tradition or those experiencing the magic of Duffy's festive verse for the first time.

Wendy Cope is a national treasure of the poetry world. This edition will be a highlight of the Christmas gift market, collecting together Cope's twelve best festive poems - jewels from decades of glittering verse - including anthology favourites such as 'The Christmas Life'. With lively illustrations to accompany the heart-warming words, this little hardback delightfully captures the spirit of the season.