A classic of world literature, Goethe's "Faust" is a philosophical and poetic drama full of satire, irony, humour and tragedy. Martin Greenberg re-creates not only the text's varied metre and rhyme but also its diverse tones and styles – dramatic and...

This volume of Yale French Studies is devoted to the work of Baudelaire, who, more than any other poet, inaugurated the era of modernity. The contributors to this issue reflect on the specific ways in which poetry – and perhaps poetry alone – allows...

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of...

From modest beginnings in 1988, when it was a listings newsletter, "Poetry London" has developed into one of the UK's leading poetry magazines. Do not be mislead by its name: "Poetry London" has the same relation to London as "The New Yorker" has to...

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, "Undertones of War", and his early edition of Wilfred Owen's poems were just...

Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. At school, too, he was introduced to the poems of Wilfred Owen, whose biography he would la...

David C. Ward's first full-length poetry collection combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America – its landscapes, its history, its politics. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite...

In "The Other Mountain" Rowan Williams relives moments of intense trial, when women and men are transformed in spirit, and sometimes in body also. He not only reads the signs as they appear in nature and history: he lives them through language. Imagi...

This "little history" tackles a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from "The Epic of Gilgamesh" to "Harry Potter". John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task, having researched, taught and writte...

To the extent that she is popularly known, Katherine Parr (1512-1548) is the woman who survived King Henry VIII as his sixth and last wife. She merits far greater recognition, however, on several other fronts. Fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, Pa...