William Barnes (1801-1886), "the Dorset Poet", wrote best in Dorest dialect: "I cannot help it. It is my mother tongue, and it is to my mind the only true speech of the life that I draw". His setting is a rural Dorset threatened by enclosure. Hopkins...

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her novel "Oroonoko". Her plays have been revived, in print and on the stage, in modern times, but much of her best work, as she herself knew, is to be found in her poetry. The versatile form and content of he...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation has sometimes been overshadowed both by the achievements of her husband, Robert Browning, and by the romantic story of their elopement. This selection recovers the best work of this independent, passionate and...

"The marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride". Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, h...

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547) was known to his contemporaries as "the most accomplished gentleman of his age", noble learned and elegant. A man of his time, at the centre of the dangerous power games of the court of Henry VIII, Surrey was...

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...

This selection makes available the full range of Robert Herrick's poetry: joyful eroticism, warm observations of rural life and shrewd epigrams, shadowed by an elegiac awareness of mortality and the fragility of beauty. The poems are animated by Herr...

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is the great poet of the Scottish people, their history and land, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed, an author...

Dual language edition. Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria in 1888. In 1912 he left Egypt to study in Paris where he was influenced by the French avant garde. Moving to Milan in 1914, he became a central figure of Italian modernism, His sense...

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), "the first great English lyric poet", remains one of the most popular writers of Henry VIII's court, and the most romantic, given his entanglement with Anne Boleyn, which resulted – legend has it – in some of his most pa...