This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth's shorter poems from 1920 to the present, including a group of new poems written since the publication of Natural Numbers, drawn from seven earlier books. Among the American poets of the generation that came to prominence in the Forties, Kenneth Rexroth has been notable both for the independence of his personal voice and for his accessibility to the tradition of international avant-garde literature. He began writing and publishing in magazines at fifteen. His earliest work was personal and concrete, much like that of the Imagists. In his twenties he wrote in the disassociative style--sometimes called "literary cubism "--developed by Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Reverdy. This was not free association, but the conscious disassociation and recombination of the elements of the poem to achieve the highest possible level of significance. With his later books Rexroth moved back to a direct and classically simple form of personal statement. In this period he wrote the great nature poems, the love poems, and the contemplative lyrics that have established his reputation as one of the most important American poets.

Tom Scott is a leading poet of the post-MacDiarmid generation. The poems in this volume range from Brand the Builder and The Paschal Candill to epigrams and translations from Villon, Ungareti, Baudelaire and others. There is a limited edition of 50 cloth-bound copies, individually numbered and signed by the author.

"This collection stops at the year nineteen-fifty-seven. In the following year I transferred my summer residence from Italy to Austria, so starting a new chapter in my life which is not yet finished. The poems included cover a span of thirty years, there are, if I've counted rightly, three hundred of them, I was twenty when I wrote the earliest, fifty when I wrote the latest: four nice round numbers. Besides, the volume looks alarmingly big already."--From the foreword.

Outstanding anthology features more than 150 English and American masterpieces spanning over 400 years. "Death Be Not Proud," "The Tyger," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," plus works by Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, others.

Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Discussing more than 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century, the book introduces readers to the skills and the critical and theoretical awareness that enable them to read poetry with enjoyment and insight. This third edition has been significantly updated in response to current developments in poetry and poetic criticism, and includes many new examples and exercises, new chapters on ‘world poetry’ and ‘eco-poetry’, and a greater emphasis throughout on American poetry, including the impact traditional Chinese poetry has had on modern American poetry. The seventeen carefully staged chapters constitute a complete apprenticeship in reading poetry, leading readers from specific features of form and figurative language to larger concerns with genre, intertextuality, Caribbean poetry, world poetry, and the role poetry can play in response to the ecological crisis. The workshop exercises at the end of each chapter, together with an extensive glossary of poetic and critical terms, and the number and range of poems analysed and discussed – 122 of which are quoted in full – make Reading Poetry suitable for individual study or as a comprehensive, self-contained textbook for university and college classes.

“What an achievement, these sixty years of poetry! In whatever terms we Americans regard the rest of our recent history, the score of things done well and done ill, this much at least we have done superlatively.”—Hayden Carruth This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period—Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks among them—along with short biographies of each. “Not only the best on its period, I think, but is even perhaps safe from the competition of rivals.”—Robert Lowell

Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken. This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

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.

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems. Encourages readers to identify with the modernists’ sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Embraces four generations of modernist American poets up through to the 1980s. Gives readers a sense of the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry. Includes close readings of particular poems which show how readers can use these works to connect with what concerns them.