Anne Finch (1661-1720) is one of the earliest English women poets of importance, a friend of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and of Henry Purcell, who set one of her poems to music. A modest and retiring writer during her lifetime, constrained both by...

Tristan Corbiere (1845-1875) evoked the peasants and sailors of his native Brittany, the bohemians and prostitutes of Paris, in a vivid, fast-paced language that gave a new voice to French poetry and made him a pivotal figure in the development of Mo...

"Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying:...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day – who is Pessoa?" asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the w...

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was a prolific writer whose independence of outlook marks her out as a strikingly modern figure. Her poetry was admired by Wordsworth, and although her work was later neglected, she is now being recognised as a major poet...

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), essayist, poet, humorist, critic, letterwriter and friend, has an enduring literary reputation. His early "Tales from Shakespeare" (1807), written in collaboration with his sister Mary, and "Specimens of English Dramatic Poe...

The "De Rerum Natura of Lucretius" (99BC-55BC) is one of the great books of the world, a lucid explanation of physical phenomena that develops into a majestic vision of the ultimate nature of the universe. Lucretius' observations of the particulari...

In this radical anthology the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space to speak and to sing. The anthology makes an essential selection of some...

Asked what problems most perplexed 'young men at present' Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) replied "a growing sense of discrepancy". His wry, wise poetry explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political and literary landsc...

In this selection, which includes the finest of the short poems and extracts from the longer ones, there is ample evidence of the quality of Cowper's faith and of his eye and ear. There are also indications of how his life, in many ways, tragic and u...

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) published thirteen volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1936, crucial transitional years in the evolution of modern poetry. His early poems were written under the shadow of the Rossettis, Swinburne and William Morris, but Fo...