"What poetry must do", Jane Cooper has written, "is alert us to a truth, and it must be necessary; once it exists, we realize how much we needed exactly this". "Scaffolding" presents Jane Cooper's new and selected poems gathered over three and a half...

Christina Rossetti was in a sense the first poet of the Pre-Raphelites, her "Goblin Market and Other Poems" (1862) having been – as if by accident – the writing from that group which first caught public attention. It contains many of her best poems....

Attempted love and sexual identity form the recurring themes of W. G. Shepherd's third collection of poems. As in his previous books, "Sun, Oak, Almond, I" (1970) and "Evidences" (1980), he writes searchingly in a variety of styles, lyric, narrative...

Robert Henryson (?-1508) is the greatest of the English fabulists. His master may have been Aesop, but the voice that speaks the "Moral Fables" is distinctively that of his place – Scotland – and his chosen tradition. His debt to Chaucer, from whom...

"Shelley's conception of love lies at the heart of his radical views on social justice, political liberty, and poetry itself". In bringing together for the first time Shelley's almost unknown prose writings on love, Richard Holmes presents an intelle...

John Skelton (1464?-1529) is the first great modern English poet. Immensely proud of his poetic calling, he celebrates in his poems the language itself, in all its richness. He wrote in a vigorous vernacular, taking literary English out of the mediev...

A house that should have creaked but did not, the work of Benjamin Britten, an attempt at fostering: the wide range of Keith Bosley's new collection springs from a few central themes – the need for constant negotiation between people, between life an...