In this unusual selection, one of the great poet-critics of the twentieth century encounters and re-appraises the greatest poet-critic of the nineteenth. William Empson, assisted by David Pirie, chooses from Coleridge's vast and uneven ouevre the sal...

This is a book not of memorable lines but of memorable poems. Eavan Boland's poetry is radically different in tone and texture from the work of her Irish contemporaries. Her concerns are never parochial. In 1979 she renounced "the evasion out of fear...

"Shadow and Bone" is Peter Levi's first collection of poems since "Private Ground" (1981), apart from two small books of "lamentations" – formal elegies for friends – "The Echoing Green" and "Shakespeare's Birthday". It is a rich and diverse collecti...

"Seeing the World", Dick Davis's second book of poems, received the Royal Society of Literature Award under the W.H. Heinemann Bequest in 1981. Dana Gioia wrote in "The Hudson Review" that it "confirms my impression that he is one of the two or three...

The present volume provides the best introduction to the work of this intelligent and lucid poet, with a selection from previous collections and a handful of recent poems. It offers vivid impressions of South Africa, Westmorland, Cumberland and the A...

George Meredith (1828-1909) is best known as the author of "The Egoist" and "Diana of the Crossways". His poetry, however, notably the poems from "Modern Love", is emerging from long eclipse, and this selection reveals the diversity and originality o...

Thomas Traherne's poems were discovered in London in 1896 and originally assigned in error to Henry Vaughan. Later scholarship has established their true authorship. Traherne (1637-1674) was a remarkable religious writer. The son of a Hereford shoe-m...

The tone of much of this new collection by Donald Justice is autumnal, memorial. These tributes in the form of elegies and homages to the almost forgotten – people and places and times past – constitute an attempt, in the author's words, to "rescue w...

"And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths where, burying a warrior, they broke his bones so he would not haunt the living. From the sea-night which you forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word. Above your head, no face, neith...

Sir Philip Sidney is the first major poet-critic. His biographer, Fulke Greville, portrayed him as a model of correctness, noble bearing and heroism. Sidney was a considerable figure in his day and is still renowned for his three major literary works...