Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face.  Or rather, with several faces, since his work... ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

The poems of the legendary Nobel Laureate, in one volume at last One of the greatest and grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky... truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months in an Arctic labor camp, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such were one man's wages. Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this will be the essential volume of Brodsky's work.

To commemorate the centennial of W. H. Auden’s birth, the Modern Library offers this elegant edition of the collected poems of one of the greatest... poets of the twentieth century. This volume includes all the poems that Auden wished to preserve, in a text that includes his final revisions, with corrections based on the latest research. Auden divided his poems into sections that corresponded to what he referred to as chapters in his life, each one beginning with a change in his inner life or external circumstances: the moment in 1933 when he first knew “exactly what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself”; his move from Britain to America in 1939; his first summer in Italy in 1948; his move to a summerhouse in Austria in 1958; and his return to England in 1972. Auden’s work has perhaps the widest range and the greatest depth of any English poet of the past three centuries. From the anxious warnings of his early verse through the expansive historical perspectives of his middle years to the celebrations and thanksgiving in his later work, Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles and forms extend from ballads and songs to haiku and limericks to sonnets, sestinas, prose poems, and dozens of other constructions of his own invention. His tone ranges from spirited comedy to memorable profundity–often within the same work. His poems manage to be secular and sacred, philosophical and erotic, personal and universal. “All the poems I have written were written for love,” Auden once said. This book includes his famous early poems about transient love (“Lay your sleeping head, my love,” “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) and his later poems about enduring love (“In Sickness and in Health,” “First Things First”). The book also includes Auden’s longer, more thematically varied poems, from the expressionist charade “Paid on Both Sides” to the formal couplets of “New Year Letter”; the darkly comic sequel to The Tempest, “The Sea and the Mirror”; and a baroque eclogue set in a wartime bar, “The Age of Anxiety.” This new edition includes a critical appreciation of Auden by Edward Mendelson, the editor of the present volume and Auden’s literary executor.“W. H. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed.”–James Fenton, The New York Review of Books“At the beginning of the new century, [Auden] is an indispensable poet. Even people who don’t read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, and Auden matters now.”–Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Patrick Kavanagh's imagery is drawn from the life of the Irish country poor, which he shared at first hand, and an inner landscape of pain and... self-knowledge.His is a unique voice in modern lyrical poetry—ferociously independent, by turns ironic, colloquial, lyrical.

Werner Herzog is renowned for pushing the boundaries of conventional cinema, especially those between the fictional and the factual, the fantastic and... the real. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth is the first study in twenty years devoted entirely to an analysis of Herzog's work. It explores the director's continuing search for what he has described as 'ecstatic truth,' drawing on over thirty-five films, from the epics Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) to innovative documentaries like Fata Morgana (1971), Lessons of Darkness (1992), and Grizzly Man (2005). Special attention is paid to Herzog's signature style of cinematic composition, his "romantic" influences, and his fascination with madmen, colonialism, and war.

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot... and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), winner in 1923 of the second annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a daring, versatile writer whose work includes... plays, essays, short stories, songs, and the libretto to an opera that premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera House to rave reviews. Millay infused new life into traditional poetic forms, bringing new hope to a generation of youth disillusioned by the political and social upheaval of the First World War. She ventured fearlessly beyond familiar poetic subjects to tackle political injustice, social discrimination, and women's sexuality in her poems and prose. In the 1920s and '30s, Millay was considered a spokesperson for personal freedom in America, particularly for women, and we turn to her lines to illuminate the social history of the period and the Bohemian lifestyle she and her friends enjoyed. Yet Millay's poetry is still decisively modern in its message, and it continues to resonate with readers facing personal and moral issues that defy the test of time: romantic love, loss, betrayal, compassion for one another, social equality, patriotism, and the stewardship of the natural world. Collected Poems features Millay's incisive and impassioned lyric poetry and sonnets, many of which are considered among the finest in the language, as well as the poet's last volume, Mine the Harvest, compiled and published in 1956 by her sister Norma Millay.

The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910-1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories,... which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse.The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia.Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.

Early in his career, Robert Creeley believed that his greatest contribution to literature would be in prose. Although he has since established himself... as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, his remarkable body of prose work--instilled with a deep understanding of language and narrative form--remains an essential part of his oeuvre. In addition to his first book of short stories THE GOLD DIGGERS, a novel THE ISLAND, a radio play LISTEN, and MABEL: A STORY, this omnibus edition includes two previously uncollected stories.

An updated edition with six new essays, including "An Evening at Shea" and "Remembering Beckett," as well as two long interviews from "one of America's... greats" (Time Out Chicago) The celebrated author of Invisible, The New York Trilogy, and The Book of Illusions presents a highly personal collection of essays, prefaces, true stories, autobiographical writings (including the seminal work The Invention of Solitude), and collaborations with artists, as well as occasional pieces written for magazines and newspapers. Ranging in subject from Sir Walter Raleigh to Kafka, Nathaniel Hawthorne to the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, conceptual artist Sophie Calle to Auster's own typewriter, the World Trade Center catastrophe to his beloved New York City itself, Collected Prose records the passions and insights of a writer who "will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle).

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The only comprehensive hardcover edition of Tolstoy's shorter fiction--57 stories and novellas, including two that... have never before appeared in English.In these two handsome volumes, every aspect of Tolstoy's art and personality is reflected: his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his belief in truth and simplicity, and above all, his growing preoccupation with religion. Ranging in scope from the short novels Hadj Murad and The Kreutzer Sonata to folktales only a few pages long, they bring us intimately into the world of the great Russian novelist.

All of O’Neill’s themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in a... single volume are nine one-act plays that span the playwright’s career—from the early sea plays to the Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie.Included in this volume: Bound East for Cardiff • Fog • Thirst • The Long Voyage Home • Ile • The Moon of the Caribbees • In the Zone • The Hairy Ape • Hughie

This third volume of Maugham’s stories, introduced and selected by the author himself, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret service... agent in WWI. Based on Maugham’s own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland, the stories are vignettes in which he dramatizes both the romance and absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness and brutality.