Early Poetry

This was Carl Sandburg's breakthrough book. It is easy to see how it draws directly on Sandburg's life in Chicago, because it speaks powerfully of the specific character of that city, and indeed, begins with his famous poem that names Chicago as the "City of the Broad Shoulders." His poetry is deeply aware of the inner life of the city, from a homeless woman freezing in a doorway to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the laborer, the hobo, the farmer, the man who works with his hands, the woman who runs a family, the soldier who goes to war for them.

This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging. The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary and Pittsburg, but he writes about many other things as well. His over-arching theme seems to be human life as a struggle in adversity, a struggle for the mere necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter, work - and a struggle for the human soul, a struggle for love, charity, justice, equality.

This is Carl Sandburg's fourth collection of poetry. His signature style, a rough-and-ready free verse that often transforms into poetic prose, is in full view. Like Whitman before him and like Masters and Frost in his own time, he puts his focus directly on life as he sees it around him, life in the rough-and-tumble Chicago of the early 20th century and life in the American West at a time when that wild country was finally succumbing to civilization

Frost's third book of poetry, North of Boston, is an extraordinary set of poems that are nearly dramas, conversations drawn from the heat of life, love, and death. From "Home Burial" and "Death of the Hired Man" to "A Hundred Collars" and "The Generations of Man", Frost's work in this volume spans the whole range of human experience, expressed always in his characteristic dry, matter-of-fact, yet wonderfully musical verse.

In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find rest?

In Charnel Rose, Conrad Aiken takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and emotionally draining search for love, and how some of us turn away from real love when we do find it, preferring instead to re-invent and re-amplify our idealistic vision of passionate perfection. He does this through an amazing combination of highly imaginative imagery conveyed through strikingly simple and beautiful poetry, musically complex....

Robert Frost's second book of poetry. Sometimes puckishly humorous, sometimes elegiac, sometimes terrifying, these poems show the young artist using his new-found voice to explore a world - a village in New Hampshire - that meant everything to him. This volume includes some of his best-known and best-loved works, such as "The Road Not Taken", "Out! Out!", "Birches", and "The Hill-wife". It also includes one of his poem-dramas, "Snow".

What begins with A? Aunt Annie's alligator! Learn the ABCs - the Dr. Seuss way.

Frost weaves together themes of innocence and experience, love and joy and pain, in a sequence of poems that relate to each other while also standing alone as vivid, fresh expressions of intense feeling that speak as freshly today as they did when they were written.

A Poem for Every Day of the Year is a magnificent collection of 366 poems compiled by Allie Esiri, one to share on every day of the year. These poems are funny, thoughtful, inspiring, humbling, informative, quiet, loud, small, epic, peaceful, energetic, upbeat, motivating and empowering!

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was a seventeen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems, beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. Blues in Stereo is a posthumous collection of these early works, in which we see Langston Hughes like we’ve never seen him before.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language. But his early work as a writer went unrecognized, and he was forced to earn his living in the newspaper business, working as an editor in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Although he was respected as a literary critic, his poetry and short stories were neglected until the publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845, which propelled him to instant fame.

Conrad Aiken was fascinated throughout his early work with the image of a tempestuous, romantic young man who tears himself away from his wife, his first love, and from a pastoral, peaceful life in a rural setting, to pursue what he hopes will be a richer, fuller, more rewarding life in a great city. In this book, Aiken explores this theme in full, especially in the final long poem, "Dust in Starlight", which also forms Part III of his trilogy, Earth Triumphant.

What Spoon River Anthology does for a Midwestern small town, Turns and Movies does for the world of vaudeville. Like Masters, like Aiken: passions, betrayals, secrets, sins, victories, defeats, and inevitable losing struggles against age and death are the stuff of this work. And that's only the first part of the book.

The sonnets are a collection numbering 154 poems dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality. They were probably written over a long period of Shakespeare's life up until 1609, when they were first printed. The first 17 poems, traditionally referred to as the "procreation sonnets", are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it on to his descendants.

Out of the mixture of Latin and Germanic paganism and the Christianity of the Early Middle Ages has sprung one of the world's supremely great pieces of literature. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, delivered a famous lecture to the British Academy in 1936 in which he maintained that Beowulf was a poem all of a piece, and not (as had been suggested) a jumble of fragments for pedantic scholars to paw over.

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

In the whimsical world of rhyming delights, where daisies dance and stars take flight, comes a poetry book that'll bring you cheer. With zany characters and bouncy rhythms to follow, this whimsical collection will make you wallow in laughter and joy, from start to end, in a merry poetic journey, my good friend! Join a cast of colorful creatures, from cats in hats to fish who shout, travel through realms of pure imagination, where trouble is turned around and doubt is avoided. Each page is adorned with vibrant art, a visual feast that sets minds apart, as the words of rhyme and reason take ...

Warrior-prince Rama is about to be crowned Young King, when he hears the devastating news that his father, king of Ayodhya, has been tricked into banishing him to the forest. His devoted wife, Sita, insists on accompanying him in exile, but the evil 10-headed Lord Ravana has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful princess and steals her away. Aided by Hanuman, mighty captain of the monkeys, Rama sets out across the world to find her and destroy Ravana in a deadly battle.