First published in 1948, "The White Goddess" is one of the century's most extraordinary books. A poet's impassioned introduction to the world of poetry, it is also a great scholar's quest for the meaning of European mythology, a polemic about the rel...

Ivor Gurney's poetic career was unusual. It began in 1917 and 1919 with two small volumes of verse, "Severn and Somme" and "War's Embers". After that, though he planned further books, none appeared until Edmund Blunden's 1954 "Selected Poems". By the...

In an essay Louise Gluck says that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off", in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the previous volume as defining the tasks of the next. The First Five Boo...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is mainly known to the English-speaking world as the author of the poetic drama "Faust". In Europe – as poet, dramatist, novelist, art critic, literary theoretician, travel writer, author of a treatise on light...

Jorie Graham's poetry insists that "the visible world" exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the merely subjective, the merely lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area "saturated with phenomena", in Helen Vendler's phrase, a pla...

Helen Vendler wrote in "The New Republic": "Louise Gluck is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional'...

This is the first of the monumental three-volume "Complete Poems of Robert Graves", edited by Dunstan Ward and the poet's widow Beryl Graves. It restores hundreds of poems that Graves omitted from the canon or overlooked in his continual refinements...

Luis de Gongora is Spain's greatest poet of the Baroque period. He was much admired by Lorca, and Roy Campbell described him as "a symbolist who contains the whole of Mallarme and a lot more besides, a symbolist three hundred years before his time"....

The ever-popular novelist and story-teller Robert Graves wrote fascinating and durable stories, here collected together in a single volume for the first time by the poet's daughter Lucia Graves.

Ivor Gurney's poetic career was unusual. It began in 1917 and 1919 with two small volumes of verse ("Severn and Somme / War's Embers", published by Carcanet). Then in 1922 he entered the asylum from which only an occasional poem in a magazine emerged...