Poetry

Shakespeare's Sonnets is the title of a collection of 154 sonnets accredited to William Shakespeare which cover themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. It was first published in a 1609 quarto with the full stylised title: SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had...

Beowulf (/ˈbeɪoʊwʊlf, ˈbiːoʊ-/; Old English: [ˈbeːo̯ˌwulf]) is an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative lines. It is possibly the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. It was written in England sometime between the 8th and the early 11th century. The author was an anonymous...

Chamber Music is a collection of poems by James Joyce, published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907. The collection originally comprised thirty-four love poems, but two further poems were added before publication ("All day I hear the noise of waters" and "I hear an army charging upon the land"). Although it is widely reported that the title refers to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot,...

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and re-writing Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first a small book of twelve poems and the last a...

Amores, a book of poetry by D. H. Lawrence.

New Poems - Poems by D. H. Lawrence, first published in October, 1918 and New Edition (Reset) in August, 1919.

The Barrack-Room Ballads is the collective name given to a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. The series contains some of Kipling's most well-known work, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy" and "Danny Deever", and helped consolidate his early fame as a poet. The first poems were published in...

Bay - A book of poems by D. H. Lawrence. "WHERE the trees rise like cliffs, proud and blue-tinted in the distance, Between the cliffs of the trees, on the grey-green park Rests a still line of soldiers, red motionless range of guards Smouldering with darkened busbies beneath the bay-onets' slant rain. Colossal in nearness a blue police sits still on his horse Guarding the path;...

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile either in Berneval-le-Grand or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol (pronounced "redding jail") on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading, after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.  During...

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great publishedmetaphysical poem". The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled....

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem,Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a "graver work". Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece lacks the humorous tone of...

Wilde’s Poems, a selection of which is given in this volume, were first published in volume form in 1881, and were reprinted four times before the end of 1882.  A new Edition with additional poems, including Ravenna, The Sphinx, and The Ballad of Reading Goal, was first published (limited issues on hand-made paper and Japanese...

The Seven Seas is a book of poetry by Rudyard Kipling published 1896. Poems include The Lost Legion.

Also known as the "Roman Elegies," Erotica Romana is von Goethe's literary tribute to human sexuality and eroticism. Written in 24 elegies to emulate classical Roman elegy writers such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus, von Goethe creates a lyrical work of art that has often been subject to censorship. 

The Years Between, a collection of poems written during the period from just after the Boer War till the aftermath of World War I, was originally published in 1919. It was the first volume of new poems by Kipling published since "The Five Nations" in 1903; including the first book appearance of Kipling's celebrated "The Female of the Species," with its awed refrain "The female of the species is...

Hermann and Dorothea is an epic poem, an idyll, written by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe between 1796 and 1797, and was to some extent suggested byJohann Heinrich Voss's Luise, an idyll in hexameters, which was first published in 1782-84. Goethe's work is set around 1792 at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, when French...

Three Unpublished Poems includes three poems: A little grey curl To papa In memoriam

Lawrence’s Tortoises poems were first published as a group in New York in 1921, then included in the First English edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers in 1923. This lovely Cheloniidae Press edition, edged in vellum over handmade paper-covered boards, is illustrated with eight wood engravings by Alan James Robinson. Number 71 of 200 copies signed by the artist on the colophon page, it is in...

"A Lover's Complaint" is a narrative poem published as an appendix to the original edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It is given the title "A Lover's Complaint" in the book, which was published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609.  Although published as Shakespeare's work, the poem's authorship has become a matter of critical debate. The majority opinion is that it is by...

Look! We Have Come Through! was first published in the United Kingdom in 1917 by Chatto and Windus, London; a US edition based on sheets from the Chatto edition was issued by B.W. Huebsch, New York, in 1918. A second, illustrated edition was issued by the Ark Press, Cornwall, in 1958, and this was in turn reissued in the USA in 1959 by The Rare Books Collection of the...