"They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me", wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, "in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me – the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down". Rilke, born in...

To mark National Poetry Day 1997, Nick Rennison, who compiled the "Waterstone's Guide to Poetry", and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late f...

"The Observer" described Anne Ridler as "one of the best poets of her generation". Anne Ridler's first book, "Poems", was published in 1939. She worked on the Faber editorial staff (1935-1940), for a time as assistant to T. S. Eliot. Her poetry devel...

Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the "Elegies" of his alter ego "Quintilius", a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provinci...

Is Modernism a few ground-breaking works by a handful of writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis? Other writers loomed large at the time; their work points in untaken directions. Andrew Crozier assembles the first definitive text of the poems and...

In 1970 Laura (Riding) Jackson published with Faber her "Selected Poems: in five sets", presenting a clutch of poems readers for the first time in the three decades since she renounced poetry, an act which challenges her readers still. In 1980 a new...

This "Selected Poems" by award-winning Australian poet Vicki Raymond is her first British publication, though her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She is an unusually gifted poet in traditional forms, with a telling sense of humo...

Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, an "heroic comedy" of love and honour, has enjoyed various revivals in the cinema and on the stage, and undergoes yet another metamorphosis in this brilliant translation by Edwin Morgan. Made for the Communicado T...

Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991 at the age of ninety. "The Poems of Laura Riding" were published in 1938, after which she renounced poetry, an act which still challenges her readers. That volume omitted some two hundred early pieces, all written...

Tadeusz Rozewicz is Poland's most popular and influential poet. Born in 1921, he belongs to the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. "What I produced is poetry for the horror-stri...