The meteoric and turbulent career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote two masterpieces, "The Illuminations" and "A Season in Hell", and some wonderful short poems. At nineteen he then turned his back o...

"The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library" was first published in 1986 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Elizabethan Club. This second, greatly enlarged edition is being published in celebration of the Club's cen...

Clive Wilmer's "New and Collected Poems" begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's "Hagia Sophia", where the great Byzantine basilica is described in te...

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable "Stanzas in Meditation". Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript tha...

"Glass is Elastic" is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see – what do we know – in a world experienced through lenses and screens? "Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing". Jon Glover explores the treachery...

This authoritative collection of Baudelaire's complete verse highlights "Les Fleurs du mal" (1857), the defining poetry collection of the 19th century in France. It caused a scandal on its appearance, with six poems banned as offensive to public mora...

Baudelaire's prose poems had two working titles: "Petits Poemes en prose" (small prose poems) and "Le Spleen de Paris". Francis Scarfe's version of this title, argued for in his introduction, is "Paris Blues". Baudelaire wrote these pieces over many...

With "The Lucretian Renaissance", Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of t...

Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than Juan Ramon Jimenez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jimenez brings together th...

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in "The Poet's Freed...