Books by E. E. Cummings

Love: Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings

by E. E. Cummings, Christopher Myers

E. E. Cummings, one of the most famous poets of all time, is known for his concise, often sassy poems that speak right to the heart. Illuminated through Caldecott Honor Illustrator Christopher Myers's electrifying artwork, E. E. Cummings' Love: Selected Poems is filled with humor, feeling, and romance for young teens and adults. From "the moon is hiding in her hair" to "may i feel, said he," this book fulfills the Cummings collector's ultimate wishes, and is the perfect gift for anyone interested in the magic and romance entrenched in the language of love.

100 Selected Poems

by E. E. Cummings

E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, E. E. Cummings, Meilo So

From AudioFile For listeners who haven't heard the classic Andersen fairly tales since their childhood, this collection from a new translation is a joy. All the famous stories are there, including "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Emperor's New Clothes." His later works also are included, such as "The Ice Maiden" and "The Wood Nymph." But listeners, especially parents planning to play this for children, should be aware that some of the stories are a little violent. For example, an oafish farmer kills his grandmother because he thinks it will bring him great wealth. But the violence is not graphic and can be explained to young listeners. Narrators Kate Reading and Richard Matthews alternate stories, a strategy that provides nice variety. Both are solid and engaging. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Product description A gawky, dreamy boy, Hans Christian Andersen grew up to become a profoundly imaginative writer and storyteller who revolutionized literature for children. Andersen gave us the now standard versions of some traditional folk tales as well as original stories that have enchanted generations of readers. To commemorate the bicentennial of his birth, Viking will publish a new translation of thirty of his extraordinary tales, illustrated with Andersen’s own paper cuts. From the exuberant early stories such as “The Tinderbox” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes” through poignant masterpieces such as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling,” to darker, more subversive later tales written for adults, the stories here are endlessly experimental, humorous and irreverent, sorrowful and strange. Tiina Nunnally’s sparkling new translation captures—for the first time in English—the vibrancy of Andersen’s voice. Compiled by Andersen’s biographer Jackie Wullschlager, who also contributes notes and a captivating introduction, this volume will be a major literary event that will dazzle readers young and old.

Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, E. E. Cummings, Meilo So

A bicentennial publication by an award-winning translator features thirty of Andersen's tales including "The Tinderbox," "The Emperor's New Clothes," and "The Little Mermaid," in a volume complemented by the writer's paper-cut illustrations. 35,000 first printing.

Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, E. E. Cummings, Meilo So

These whimsical, timeless tales, by one of our most treasured poets, will appeal to any generation. The four tales in this enchanting, newly illustrated volume, tell of lonely and extraordinary characters finding friendship in unlikely companions. In "The Old Man Who Said Why" a wise fairy's kind nature is taxed when one old man's questions throw the entire heavens into madness. In "The Elephant and the Butterfly" and "The House That Ate Mosquito Pie" shyness is overcome by the compelling love of new friends. "The Little Girl Named I" is a conversation between the author and a small girl, in the manner of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

Clever, insightful, and magical, peopled with vivid characters―a house that prefers one bird to any human inhabitants, an elephant paralyzed with delight, a fairy who "always breakfasted on light and silence"here are tales as only Cummings could write them. A delightful and surprising gift for anyone, young or old. 21 color watercolors

73 Poems

by E. E. Cummings, George Firmage

"Cummings...at his most unfoolish and poetic best."―Nation Four months after Cummings's death in September 1962, his widow, the photographer Marion Morehouse, collected the typescripts of 29 new poems. These poems, as well as uncollected poems published only in periodicals up to that time, make up 73 Poems. This is the final volume in Liveright's reissue of Cummings's individual volumes of poetry, with texts and settings based on E. E. Cummings: The Complete Poems 1904-1962.

The Enormous Room (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

by E. E. Cummings

In 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy. Under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room, his account of his four-month confinement, reads like a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his existence: to lose everything is to become free, and so to be saved.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

i: six nonlectures (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

by E. E. Cummings

The author begins his “nonlectures” with the warning “I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.” Then, at intervals, he proceeds to deliver the following:

1. i & my parents
2. i & their son
3. i & selfdiscovery
4. i & you & is
5. i & now & him
6. i & am & santa claus

These talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e. e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e. e. cummings.

95 Poems

by E. E. Cummings

A paperback collection newly offset from Complete Poems 1904-1962 with an afterword by the Cummings scholar George James Firmage. Published in 1958, 95 Poems is the last book of new poems published in Cummings's lifetime. Remarkable for its vigor, freshness, interest in ordinary individuals, and awareness of the human life cycle, the book reflects Cummings's observations on nature and his prevailing gratitude for whatever life offers: "Time's a strange fellow: more he gives than takes." This new edition joins other individual uniform Liveright paperback volumes drawn from the Complete Poems, most recently Etcetera and 22 and 50 Poems.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

The first selected poems of a major poet who "wrote with more heart than any other North American poet of the twentieth century" (Rodney Jones, Parnassus)

More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of America: its rail yards, rivers, cities, and once vast natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.

Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

tr Robin Fulton

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more—including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled "Remembering Gwen."

By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems. This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

One of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter poems such as 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Tintern Abbey', 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Michael'. Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth's astonishing range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed his work.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

This selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic "Auld Lang Syne," the romantic "A Red, Red Rose," and the patriotic "Scots What Hae." As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range—from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street―these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry."

That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

One of the most enduringly popular of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and his belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a rich selection from the most creative period of Wordsworth’s life—from “Tintern Abbey,” an ode on the restorative powers of nature written during his intense friendship with Coleridge, to excerpts from his epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Also included are much-loved short works such as “I wandered as lonely as a Cloud,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” and the poignant “Lucy Gray.” These poems demonstrate Wordsworth’s astonishing range, power, and inventiveness, and the sustained and captivating vision that informed his work.

The inaugural volume in a new program of selected poetry especially commissioned for Penguin Classics Includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, and an index of titles and first lines In his introduction, Wordswort biographer Stephen Gill examines the personal and political events that shaped the poet's career and traces the major themes that run through his work

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O’Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. O’Hara’s style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O’Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O’Hara’s tragically foreshortened career, including his drama, and is followed by an appendix of key prose texts such as “Personism,” in which O’Hara succinctly summed up his overall approach to poetry: “You just go on your nerve.”

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence upon modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.

Selected Poems contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of his work. Harold Bloom has contributed a new Foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The inclusion of several pivotal poems from previous editions broadens the scope of the work to represent Aiken's legacy.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Chosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet’s most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”—as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.”

This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world.

This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A sampling from the oeuvre of one of the greatest living poets of the English language

Geoffrey Hill’s poetry comprises one of the most uncompromising and visionary bodies of work written over the last fifty years. Imbued with the weight of history, morality, and language, his work reveals a deeply religious sensibility, a towering intellect, and an emotional complexity that are unrivaled in contemporary letters. Now, for the first time ever, readers can observe in one volume how Hill’s style took shape over time. This generous selection spans his career, beginning with poems from Hill’s astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, and following through to his stylistically distinct and critically acclaimed work Without Title. Including some of the poet’s strongest, most sensitive, and most brilliant pieces, this collection will reaffirm Hill’s reputation as “England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize.”

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age.
Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street―these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry."

That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.
―from "Blood and Lead"

The leading poet of his generation, James Fenton has over the course of his career built a body of work breathtaking in its range and sensibility. From the passionate political poems that launched him into fame to the intimate illuminations of love―and loss of love―in his later work, Fenton's poetry has always been marked by formal daring, wit, and an abiding empathy for the victims of war and political oppression. With selections from all of his published work since The Memory of War, the entire text of his libretto The Love Bomb, and new, previously uncollected poems, Selected Poems is an imaginative and formal tour de force.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work.

Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his later major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem.

Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor.

Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott's breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn's dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco―the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped―by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift―to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Considered by Victorians as the finest contemporary poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) gained much critical favor for his mastery of poetic technique, high-mindedness, and superb natural description. This volume contains a representative selection of his best works, including the famous long narrative poem "Enoch Arden," as well as a number of important lyrics, monologues, ballads, and other typical pieces. Among these are "The Lady of Shalott," "The Beggar Maid," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Break, break, break," "Flower in the Crannied Wall," and "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." Also here are carefully chosen, uncut excerpts from three longer works: The Princess, "Maud," and "The Brook." With this inexpensive volume at their fingertips, students and lovers of poetry can enjoy a substantial sampling of Tennyson's still-admired, widely quoted verse.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
Generally considered among the greatest American poets, Emily Dickinson has been read, studied, and admired by generations of literature students and poetry lovers. This modestly priced edition presents over 100 of her best-known and most-loved poems, reprinted from authoritative early editions. Unflinchingly honest, psychologically penetrating, and technically adventurous, the poems include such favorites as "The Chariot," "I taste a liquor never brewed," "The Snake," "I'm nobody, who are you?" "A Book," "There's a certain slant of light," "Hope," and many more.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A reissue of the 1935 Selected Poems, which, with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot, brought Moore's work to the attention of a wider public.
This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten key titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China’s most acclaimed poets—now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei

One of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to American readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as “Little Siberia” with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei.

In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing with change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain about what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers. Selected Poems is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Denise Levertov's Selected Poems delivers in a single accessible volume "one of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash). Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry―the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature."

Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Acclaiming the late Eugenio Montale (1897-1981) as “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West,” the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. This selection, introduced by Glauco Cambon, presents sixty-nine poems chosen from Montale’s first three books––Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), Le occasioni (The Occasions), and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things)––as rendered by sixteen translators, many of them distinguished poets in their own right.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, first came to Kinvara, County Galway, for a year in 1990 and has long since been a distinctive presence on the Irish literary scene. He now lives in South Tipperary. Introduced by poet and critic Dennis O'Driscoll, Selected Poems is Tillinghast's tenth book of poems and gathers the poet's own choice of some forty years of his work. "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. His experiments in meter, rhyme, and free verse are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few. -Louis Simpson

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

"[Selected Poems] offers readers a chance to catch on to one of the most distinctive talents of our time, one of the few who can genuinely startle. . . . Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness."—Tony Hoagland
of all things standing furthest
from what is real, stand these trees
shaking with dispensable joy . . .
Mary Ruefle is the winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award and has authored ten collections of poetry; The Most of It, a book of prose; and A Little White Shadow, a collection of erasures. She teaches at Vermont College.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

Poetry. A career-defining retrospective by a much-beloved contemporary master, SELECTED POEMS gathers together the finest work from her distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most brilliant, expert and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining, need look no further than this monolithic retrospective.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

A collection to introduce English readers to the wonders of Lorca's poetry This selection has been the introduction for generations of American readers to the mesmerizing poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1937). Lorca is admired the world over for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. Most of all, Lorca's poems are admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences ― Spanish folk traditions of his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel ― stream throughout Lorca's work.

Selected Poems

by Mary Ruefle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca, James Wright, Anne Wright, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Eugenio Montale, Olav Hauge, William Wordsworth, alfred-lord-tennyson, Conrad Aiken, Geoffrey Hill, Frank O'Hara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Thom Gunn, Ai Qing, Denise Levertov, Paul Lacey, Glauco Cambon, Richard Tillinghast

"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."―Randall Jarrell
The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.

XAIPE

by E. E. Cummings

XAIPE (Greek for "rejoice"), which first appeared in 1950, contains some of E. E. Cummings's finest work. Among many poems can be found "dying is fine)but Death," "so many selves(so many friends and gods," "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm," "no time ago," "I thank You God for most this amazing," and "now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have."

Erotic Poems

by E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in a single volume.
Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage.
from “16”
may i feel said he
(i’ll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she 12 drawings

A Miscellany

by E. E. Cummings

A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades, sheds further light on the prodigious vision and imagination of the most inventive poet of the twentieth century: E.E. Cummings.
Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings’s groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to “a cluster of epigrams,” a poem, three speeches from an unfinished play, and forty-nine essays―most of them previously written for or published in magazines, anthologies, or art gallery catalogues. Seven years later, George J. Firmage―editor of much of Cummings’s work, including Complete Poems―broadened the scope of this delightfully eclectic collection, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings.
Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric, yet precise, genius. Like his poetry, Cummings’s prose is lively; often witty, biting, and offbeat, he is an intelligent observer and critic of the modern. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany contains “a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead.” This remains true today, more than fifty years after its original publication.

Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (Liveright Classics)

by E. E. Cummings

Considered one of the most inventive American poets of his time who helped bring about the 20th century revolution in literary expression, this collection contains all the poems published or designated for publication by the poet during his lifetime.

The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings

“Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives―The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings.”―F. Scott Fitzgerald The most notable work of fiction from our most beloved modernist poet, The Enormous Room was one of the greatest―yet still not fully recognized― American literary works to emerge out of World War I. Drawing on E. E. Cummings’s experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, this novel takes us through a series of mishaps that led to the poet’s being arrested for treason and imprisoned. Out of this trauma Cummings produced a work like no other―a story of oppression and injustice told with his characteristic linguistic energy and unflappable exuberance, which celebrates the spirit of the individual and offers a brave and brilliant opposition in the face of the inhumanity of war.
Illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France and featuring an illuminating new introduction by Susan Cheever, this reissued edition offers a unique and multifaceted lens onto the inner life of the poet in his youth and demands recognition by a twenty-first-century readership. 56 drawings

E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962

by E. E. Cummings

Presented here in a bold new edition, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962 showcases Cummings’s transcendent body of work, collected in its entirety.
Combining Thoreau’s controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings’s work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.
In the words of Randall Jarrell, “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader.”

The Enormous Room (The New York Review Books Classics)

by E. E. Cummings

A centenary edition of E. E. Cummings's antic autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in a French military detention camp during World War I.

In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, a recent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. He arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, and they set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences, which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in The Enormous Room, a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as his poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like Catch-22 and MASH, Cummings’s novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature.

EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia

by E. E. Cummings

A reissue of E. E. Cummings's long-unavailable, yet pointed and moving story of a journey through Soviet Russia. Unavailable for more than fifty years, EIMI finally returns. While sometimes termed a "novel," it is better described as a novelistic travelogue, the diary of a trip to Russia in the 1930s during the rise of the Stalinist government. Despite some contempt for what he witnesses, Cummings's narrator has an effective, occasionally hilarious way of evoking feelings of accord and understanding. As Ezra Pound wrote, Cummings's Soviet Union is laid "out there pellucidly on the page in all its Slavic unfinishedness, in all of its Dostoievskian slobberyness....Does any man wish to know about Russia? 'EIMI'!"
A stylistic tour de force, EIMI is a mélange of styles and tones, the prose containing many abbreviations, grammatical and syntactical shifts, typographical devices, compounds, and word coinages. This is Cummings's invigorating and unique voice at its finest, and EIMI is without question one of his most substantial accomplishments.

The Enormous Room (The Cummings Typescript Editions)

by E. E. Cummings

"A prose work of literary art. There had never been anything quite like it before and there has never been anything like it since." ―Richard S. Kennedy In print continuously since 1922, The Enormous Room is one of the classic American literary works to emerge from World War I, in a grouping that includes John Dos Passo's Three Soldiers and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Drawing on his experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, Cummings takes us through a series of mistakes that led to his being arrested for treason and sent to prison. Out of this episode Cummings produced a unique work―a story of oppression, injustice, and imprisonment presented in a high-spirited manner as if it were a lark, a work of new linguistic energy that celebrates the individual and opposes all structures that stifle him.

This edition restores to the work much material that was deleted from the manuscript for the book's 1922 publication and is illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France.

The Theatre of E. E. Cummings

by E. E. Cummings

The complete collection of E. E. Cummings’s writing for the stage, from the most inventive poet of the twentieth century. The Theatre of E. E. Cummings collects in their entirety Cummings’s long out-of-print theatrical works: the plays HIM (1927), Anthropos (1930), and Santa Claus (1946), and the ballet treatment Tom (1935). In HIM, a creatively blocked artist and his lover, Me, struggle to bridge the impasse in their relationship and in his art. In Anthropos, a Platonic parable, three “infrahumans” brainstorm slogans while a man sketches on a cave wall; and in Santa Claus, Death and Saint Nick exchange identities. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is reimagined as dance, transforming the novel into a symbolic attack against Evil itself. Cummings’s prodigious creativity is on display in each of these works, which are ultimately about the place of the artist outside of society. “DON’T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU,” Cummings famously wrote about his intentions for the stage. Thoughtful and witty, Cummings’s dramas are an integral part of his canon.

The Enormous Room (Warbler Classics)

by E. E. Cummings

The Enormous Room is a fictionalized autobiographical account of the three months that E. E. Cummings spent in a French prison under suspicion of espionage--a circumstance he could have easily avoided had he professed a hatred of Germans. Instead, when questioned, Cummings answered French authorities in a way that insured that he would accompany his friend "B." (William Slater Brown), who was indeed guilty of writing letters critical of the French government. The psychologically tense narrative--shocking and provocative in its day--juxtaposes the barbarity and inhumanity of war against the camaraderie and collective spirit of the oppressed. As a piece of writing, it foreshadows the whimsy, humor, pessimism, and jubilance that would come to characterize Cummings's poetry while, on its own, it stands as a major work of World War I literature. This Warbler Classics edition includes Paul Headrick's essay "Brilliant Obscurity: The Reception of The Enormous Room," as well as a detailed biographical timeline. "It's not as an account of a war atrocity or as an attack on France...that The Enormous Room is important, but as a distinct conscious creation separate from anything else under heaven." --John Dos Passos

When the World Is Puddle-Wonderful

by E. E. Cummings

Vivid, joyful poetry and bright, whimsical artwork combine in a delightful picture book collection of E. E. Cummings's verse that tracks the seasons of the year.

Welcome to a marvelous almanac of E. E. Cummings's poetry, from the showers, puddles, and birdsong of spring to the beaches and sun of summer, Halloween, November sunsets, snowfalls, and little silent Christmas trees. Now published as the first-ever picture book collection of Cummings's poems and imagined for contemporary readers with beloved artist Blanca Gómez's sprightly and charming illustrations, when the world is puddle-wonderful bursts with joy and wonder at the world around us.