Beskrivelse
Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future, sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees
—William Blake
This unique full-colour anthology gathers together for the first time significant portraits of fifty major British and Irish poets from four centuries along with a classic poem by each writer. It ranges chronologically from Sir Thomas Wyatt born in 1503 to Rudyard Kipling born in 1865, and every poem (like every portrait) has been chosen for its insight, importance and beauty, they can all be repeatedly read, perhaps memorized and certainly treasured.
Each poet gathered here offers you an intimate view from their time, dealing with love, loss, grief, hope and mortality, which will find echoes and reverberations in your own. This is the power of poetry, the only art which allows us to look into the heart of the past whilst trying to understand the present and imagining our possible futures.
From out of our shared literary and visual history, the history of the British Isles and Ireland, our poetry transcends the generations to offer us the guidance of art and the written and visual life of our island nations.
Chris Emery was born in Manchester in 1963 and studied painting and printmaking in Leeds. He is Publishing Director of Salt in Cambridge, England. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Age, Jacket, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, PN Review and The Rialto. A first full-length collection, Dr. Mephisto (Arc Publications, 2002), his latest collection is Radio Nostalgia (Arc Publications, 2006). He is also the author or a bestselling writer’s guide, 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell (Salt Publishing, 2006). He lives in Great Wilbraham with his wife, three children and various other animals.
Table of contents
Introduction
Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503-42)
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99)
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
John Donne (1572-1631)
William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649)
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Sir William Davenant (1606-68)
John Milton (1608-74)
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-74)
John Dryden (1631-1700)
Aphra Behn (1640-89)
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80)
Anne Wharton (1659-85)
William Congreve (1670-1729)
John Gay (1685-1732)
Alexander Pope and his dog, Bounce (1688-1744)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
Thomas Gray (1716-71)
Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74)
William Cowper (1731-1800)
William Blake (1757-1827)
Robert Burns (1759-96)
Mary Ann Lamb (1764-1867)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Mary Robinson (1783-84)
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Clare (1793-1864)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)
Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
Robert Browning (1812-89)
Emily Bronte (1818-48)
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
George Meredith (1828-1909)
Christina Rossetti (1830-94)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Acknowledgements
