Whitman is today regarded as America's Homer or Dante, and his work the touchstone for literary originality in the New World. In Leaves of Grass, he abandoned the rules of traditional poetry - breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the vernacular. Emily Dickinson condemned his sexual and physiological allusions as d̀isgraceful', but Emerson saw the book as the m̀ost extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom...

Recounts the quests of certain knights as they struggled to achieve specific virtues, including stories that involve dragons, witches, and enchanted mirrors, in a work that was dedicated to Elizabeth I.

Taking a different tack than John Keats in 'Ode to a Nightingale, ' Stephen Dobyns joins sixty-nine poems in Common Carnage, his ninth book of poetry, in order to address the conundrum 'How hard to love the world; we must love the world.' The spiritual intermixed with the bawdy, the courageous with the cowardly, the kindly with the cruel - Common Carnage rejects the decorous and decorative to map the complexity, the common carnage of our lives as...

Psalms from Shakespeare, Milton, Longfellow and others.

An Octave Above Thunder presents a collection of poems spanning more than twenty years in the career of Carol Muske, who has won acclaim for work that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and technical craft. This volume brings together new poems and a generous selection of work from Muske's five previously published collections.