Poetry

A literar y sensation when it appeared in 1915, Spoon River Anthology earned Edgar Lee Masters comparisons to T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. The characters who speak here tarnish the pure image of their Midwestern hamlet by holding forth from the grave with tales of illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. The first serious work of psychological naturalism, this artful indictment of small-town hypocrisy influenced Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and other luminaries. more...

Price: $15.00

Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator and writer known for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form which he popularised. more...

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The aim of this book is to list every reference to William Blake published between 1757 and 1863 and every criticism and edition of his works from the beginning to the present. Partly because of the deluge of scholarship in the last forty years, it includ more...

Price: $75.00

Through the staccato energy and musical temperance of rhyming verse and iambic articulation, A Lover's Anthem speaks the inimitable language of unrequited love and romantic indestructibility. It is a collection of aesthetically sensitive and moral insights drawn from some seventy years of a life seldom in retreat but ever striving prophetically for the concept of love made perfect through honesty and truth. more...

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A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought. At the close of the Civil War, the United States took a deep breath to lick wounds and consider the damage done. A Summer of Hummingbirds reveals how, at that tender moment, the lives of some of our most noted writers, poets, and artists-including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade-intersected to make sense of it all. Renowned critic Christopher Benfey maps the intricate web of friendship, family, and romance that connects these larger than life personalities to one another, and in doing so discovers a unique moment in the development of American character. In this meticulously researched and creatively imagined work, Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his wayward pupil Emily Dickinson; into the mind of Henry Ward Beecher and within the writings and paintings of his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Summer of Hummingbirds unveils how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial (and often contradictory) ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism, and beauty. Benfey's complex tale of interconnection comes to an apex in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1882, a time when loyalties were betrayed and thoughts exchanged with the speed of a hummingbird's wings. Here in the wake of the very public Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton sex scandal, Mabel Loomis Todd-the young and beautiful protŽgŽe to the hummingbird painter Martin Johnson Heade-begins an affair with Austin Dickinson and l more...

Price: $25.95