John Gay (1685-1732) was part of the "association of wits" that included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. But though Gay's exposure of weakness and folly is no less acute than theirs, his wit is characterised by a benign and ironic sense of the fal...

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), essayist, reviewer, dramatist, novelist, librettist and poet, became one of the most popular authors in that "age of authors", especially for The Vicar of Wakefield. In this selection of his poetry and prose, John Lucas...

"In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton" (1943) Robert Graves – half a century before Carol Ann Duffy – creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs...

"Antigua, Penny, Puce" (1937), a barbed tale of sibling rivalry, gave its title to a never-issued one penny puce-and-white stamp from Antigua with George VI's portrait on it and three puce pigs eating at a puce trough. Jane and Oliver are the sibling...

"A Puzzling Harvest" includes Harry Guest's six previous collections, a group of new poems and a generous selection of his versions from French, German, Italian and Japanese. This substantial book demonstrates the scope of Guest's achievement in near...

"The Song Atlas" is the world's first anthology of poetry from every country in the world. Five years in the making, the creation of such a book as almost as interesting as the poems contained therein. Making "The Song Atlas" by John Gallas Start...

Loiuse Gluck has long practised poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and...

We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the "Odyssey", Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was a woman, herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausi...

"The Greek Myths" has long been among Graves' most popular works, compendious in scope and lively in the telling. No poet of the twentieth century, not even Ezra Pound, was so compendiously learned as Graves in the origins of our Mediterranean cultur...

With his poetry debut "Creek Water Journal" (1974), Robert Gray at once established his name as a highly original "imagist". Even Les Murray, who had until then staunchly refused to review the work of a contemporary was moved to declare: "Mr Gray has...