What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work--over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago...

A collection of over four hundred poems written in many parts of the English-speaking world in the twentieth century, including works by Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, and John Updike, with brief biographies of each poet represented.

A collection of a great variety of American poetry published in 2004.

"American history got you down? Are you feeling alienated? Join poet James Cagney in his blistering second collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness, as he journeys through time, space, and memory with caustic, satirical beauty. Recall American history through its spent shell casings! Turn familial ghosts into art valuable for generations! In these fully charged poems, Cagney storms through American fields blooming with artillery and anger on his...

"A luminous collection of essays from one of our most original and influential poets. Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving...