Synopses & Reviews
From the selected works of such celebrated and beloved poets as W. H. Auden, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and William Shakespeare, to anthologies on Jazz and Blues and Beat Poets, to collections on the timeless themes of love and marriage, friendship and motherhood, the Everymans Library Pocket Poets set has it all. Theres something for everyone to enjoy in this 75-volume set, from
Animal Poems to
Zen Poems. Each book comes in an elegant 256-page pocket-sized hardcover edition (4 1/8" x 6 1/4"), with full-cloth covers, lovely illustrated and jewel-tone jackets, silk ribbon markers, and gold stamping. Perfect for your home library, or as a gift for any occasion.
This set includes one each of the following titles:
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry edited by Peter Washington
Animal Poems edited by John Hollander
Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova
Auden: Poems by W. H. Auden
Baudelaire: Poems by Charles Baudelaire
Beat Poets edited by Carmela Ciuraru
Blake: Poems by William Blake
Blues Poems edited by Kevin Young
Browning: Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Byron: Poems by Lord Byron, G. Gordon
Chinese Erotic Poems edited by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping
Christmas Poems edited by Peter Washington
Coleridge: Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Comic Poems edited by Peter Washington
Conversation Pieces by Kurt Brown
The Dance edited by Emily Fragos
Dickinson: Poems by Emily Dickinson
Doggerel edited by Carmela Ciuraru
Donne: Poems by John Donne
Eliot: Poems by T. S. Eliot
Emerson: Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emily Bronte: Poems by Emily Bronte
Erotic Poems edited by Peter Washington
Eugene Onegin and Other Poems by Alexander Pushkin
Fatherhood edited by Carmela Ciuraru
Friendship Poems edited by Peter Washington
Frost: Poems by Robert Frost
Garden Poems edited by John Hollander
The Great Cat edited by Emily Fragos
Haiku edited by Peter Washington
Hardy: Poems by Thomas Hardy
Herbert: Poems by George Herbert
Hopkins: Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hughes: Poems by Langston Hughes
Indian Love Poems edited by Meena Alexander
Jazz Poems edited by Kevin Young
Keats: Poems by John Keats
Kipling: Poems by Rudyard Kipling
Letters by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Love Letters edited by Peter Washington
Love Poems edited by Peter Washington
Love Songs and Sonnets edited by Peter Washington
Love Speaks Its Name by J. D. McClatchy
Lullabies and Poems for Children edited by Diana Secker Larson
Marriage Poems edited by John Hollander
Marvell: Poems by Andrew Marvell
Milton: Poems by John Milton
Motherhood edited by Carmela Ciuraru
On Wings of Song by J. D. McClatchy
Persian Poets edited by Peter Washington
Plath: Poems by Sylvia Plath
Poe: Poems by Edgar Allen Poe
Poems Bewitched and Haunted edited by John Hollander
Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Poems by Robert Burns
Poems of Mourning edited by Peter Washington
Poems of New York edited by Elizabeth Schmidt
Poems of Sleep and Dreams edited by Peter Washington
Poems of the American West edited by Robert Mezey
Poems of the Sea by J. D. McClatchy
Prayers edited by Peter Washington
Rilke: Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rimbaud: Poems by Arthur Rimbaud
The Roman Poets edited by Peter Washington
Rossetti: Poems by Christina Rossetti
Shakespeare: Poems by William Shakespeart
Shelley: Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Solitude edited by Carmela Ciuraru
Sonnets edited by John Hollander
Stevens: Poems by Wallace Stevens
Tennyson: Poems by Lord Alfred Tennyson
War Poems edited by Peter Washington
Whitman: Poems by Walt Whitman
Wordsworth: Poems by William Wordsworth
Zen Poems edited by Peter Harris
Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.
Synopsis
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range.
The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Joness plaintive “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” and Bob Kaufmans stirring “Abomunist Manifesto” appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers.
Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.
About the Author
Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of the anthology First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them, and the former editor of the Journal of the Poetry Society of America. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Foreword RAY BREMSER (1934-98)
From Poems of Madness (“City Madness”)
GREGORY CORSO (1930-2001)
Hello
From Ode to Coit Tower
From Transformation & Escape
I Am 25
Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway
Away One Year
After Reading “In the Clearing”
Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday
Second Night in N.Y.C. After 3 Years
ELISE COWEN (1933-62)
“Trust yourself—but not too far”
ROBERT CREELEY (1926- )
Chasing the Bird
The Dishonest Mailmen
I Know a Man
The End
The Hill
The Rain
For Love
DIANE di PRIMA (1934- )
Revolutionary Letter #1
Poem in Praise of My Husband (Taos)
The Quarrel
April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa
Poetics
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919- )
#9 (“Truth is not the secret of a few”)
#13 (“It was a face which darkness could kill”)
#22 (“crazy to be alive in such a strange world”)
#39 (“A blockage in the bowel”)
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-97)
From Howl
“Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square”
My Alba
Song
Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo
Tears
From Kaddish
A Supermarket in California
Sunflower Sutra
From America
BARBARA GUEST (1923- )
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
Sunday Evening
LEROI JONES (Amiri Baraka) (1934- )
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
Sex, like desire
War Poem
Political Poem
LENORE KANDEL (1932- )
Enlightenment Poem
Blues for Sister Sally
Junk/Angel
BOB KAUFMAN (1925-86)
Benediction
West Coast Sounds—1956
Fragment
Ginsberg (for Allen)
Abomunist Manifesto
JACK KEROUAC (1922-69)
Mexican Loneliness
How to Meditate
A Sudden Sketch Poem
116
Hymn
From Mexico City Blues
TULI KUPFERBERG (1923- )
“I dreamed of a bum seven foot tall”
“My muse goosed me”
JOANNE KYGER (1934- )
“It is lonely”
“My father died this spring”
May 29
“Its a great day”
PHILIP LAMANTIA (1927- )
From Hypodermic Light
High
“Man is in pain”
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923-97)
The Gypsys Window
The Flight
The Marriage
The Marriage (II)
Poem from Manhattan
JOANNA McCLURE (1930- )
A Vacancy
MICHAEL McCLURE (1932- )
The Flowers of Politics (I)
The Flowers of Politics (II)
Mad Sonnet 13
DAVID MELTZER (1937- )
From the Untitled Epic Poem
6th Raga: For Bob Alexander
15th Raga: For Bela Lugosi
HAROLD NORSE (1916- )
Picasso Visits Braque
I Would Not Recommend Love
“I Have Always Liked George Gershwin More than Ernest Hemingway”
I Have Seen the Light and It Is My Mind
Hotel Nirvana
FRANK OHARA (1926-66)
Personal Poem
Autobiographia Literaria
Today
My Heart
Avenue A
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think
Having a Coke With You
PETER ORLOVSKY (1933- )
Peters Jealous of Allen
“Writing poems is a Saintly thing”
Some One Liked Me When I Was Twelve
Collaboration: Letter to Charlie Chaplin
MARIE PONSOT (1921- )
Take My Disproportionate Desire
Matins & Lauds
Communion of Saints: The Poor Bastard Under the Bridge
Easter Saturday, NY, NY
Rockefeller the Center
GARY SNYDER (1930- )
Migration of Birds
A Sinecure for P. Whalen
Under the Skin of It
August on Sourdough, a Visit from Dick Brewer
ANNE WALDMAN (1945- )
How the Sestina (Yawn) Works
Revolution
Diaries
The Blue That Reminds Me of the Boat When She Left
LEW WELCH (1926-72)
“Whenever I make a new poem”
“I know a mans supposed to have his hair cut short”
PHILIP WHALEN (1923- )
For C.
20:vii:58, On Which I Renounce the Notion of Social Responsibility
Prose Take-Out, Portland, 13:ix:58
Something Nice About Myself
True Confessions
JOHN WIENERS (1934- )
A Poem for Tea Heads
From A Poem for Painters
A Poem for the Insane
LETTERS, ENCOUNTERS, & STATEMENTS
ON POETICS
Donald Allen (1912- )
William Burroughs (1914-97)
Gregory Corso
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouac
Frank OHara
Peter Orlovsky
Acknowledgments
Index of First Lines