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Книги издательства «Wordsworth»
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«Robert Burns, the most celebrated of all Scottish poets, is remembered with great devotion — his birthday on 25th January provokes fervour and festivity among Scots and many others the world over. Born in 1759 into miserable rustic poverty, by the age of eighteen Burns had acquired a good knowledge of both classical and English literature. In June 1786 his first collection of verse, «Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect», which included «To a Mouse» and «The Cotter's Saturday Night», was greeted with huge acclaim by all classes of society. His later poems and ballads include Auld Lang Syne, the beautiful song «My Love is like a Red Red Rose», «Highland Mary», «Scots Wha Hae» and his masterpiece, «Tam o'Shanter».» |
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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. |
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This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) includes all the poems contained in the Definitive Edition of 1940. In his lifetime, Kipling was widely regarded as the unofficial Poet Laureate, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His poetry is striking for its many rhythms and popular forms of speech, and Kipling was equally at home with dramatic monologues and extended ballads. He is often thought of as glorifying war, militarism, and the British Empire, but an attentive reading of the poems does not confirm that view. This edition reprints George Orwell's hard-hitting account of Kipling's poems, first published in 1942, and generally regarded as one of the most important contributions to critical discussion of Kipling. |
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John Donne (1572-1631) is a poet of concerted emotional and intellectual force, whose strenuously original approach to the subject matter, diction and form of verse re-made English poetry. Donne’s poetry combines paradoxical wit, scientific and theological learning with the rhythms and diction of spoken language. Crises of love, conscience, and faith are the great concerns of his poetry which is by turns exalted or disenchanted, direct or oblique, morally profound or outrageously spiteful. |
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Housman's melodic and memorable poems have been popular for over a century. He writes typically of lost love, of the brevity of happiness, of young soldiers doomed to die. Admirers have found his work elegant and resonant; detractors have thought much of it mannered and glib. But Housman speaks with two voices: the smooth texts conceal a dark sub-text. This tormented and secretive man wrote poems alive with indirect self-disclosure. |
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Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includes the haunting elegy to his young sister and the grieving lyric at the death of his father. The religious drama of his romance with Rome is captured here, as well as its resolution in his renewed love of ancient Greece. He explores forbidden sexual desires, pays homage to the great theatre stars and poets of his day, observes cityscapes with impressionist intensity. His final masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, tells the painful story of his own prison experience and calls for universal compassion. This edition of Wilde's verse presents the full range of his achievement as a poet. |
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W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his ‘very self’ into his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman’s greatness, described him as ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’. For anyone interested in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yeats’s work is essential. This volume gathers the full range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today as eloquently as ever. |
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Although Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been characterized as an austere, bearded patriarch and laureate of the Victorian age, his poems speak clearly to the imagination of the late 20th century. His mastery of rhyme, metre, imagery and mood communicate their dark, sensuous and sometimes morbid messages. Much given to melancholy and feelings of aching desolation, Tennyson's verse also carries clear messages of hope: 'Ring out the old, ring in the new', and 'Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all'. |
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«Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes «Sredni Vastor» and «The Unrest Cure».» |
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Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken into the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe, he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling. His stepfather's disapproval shattered their fragile relationship and Poe left home to seek his fortune. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities — journalism, poetry, lecturing, short stories, publishing, criticism and experimentation with fictional genres, including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) — he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of 'The Raven' in 1845. The poem's instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained desperate: poverty, illness, drink, and the physical decline and ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely and premature decline. In 1849 he was found sick, injured and semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to hospital, he lingered on for four days, but never recovered and on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40. He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters — a genius who, thanks to his dire reputation, was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime. It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe, and became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. |
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«Wilde's works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artistry and wit, of which the best-known is «The Happy Prince». Counterpoints to this were his novel «The Picture of Dorian Gray», which shocked and outraged many readers of his day, and his stories for adults which exhibited his fascination with the relations between serene art and decadent life. Wilde took London by storm with his plays, particularly his masterpiece «The Importance of Being Earnest». His essays — in particular «De Profundis» — and his «Ballad of Reading Gaol», both written after his release from prison, strikingly break the bounds of his usual expressive range. His other essays and poems are all included in this comprehensive collection of the works of one of the most exciting writers of the late nineteenth century.» |
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«A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw capitalism is as correct now as when it was written, and some of his suggestions (progressive income tax, abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now accepted with little question. In a world where capitalism is no longer held in check by fear of a communist alternative, «The Communist Manifesto» (with «Socialism Utopian and Scientific», Engels's brief and clear exposition of Marxist thought) is essential reading. «The Condition of the Working Class» in England is Engels's first, and probably best-known, book. With Henry Mayhew's «London Labour and the London Poor», it was and is the outstanding study of the working class in Victorian England.» |
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«The Jungle Book» introduces Mowgli, the boy foundling adopted by a family of wolves, Shere Khan the tiger, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the sleepy brown bear. How did the Leopard get his spots? How did the Elephant get his trunk? In Just So Stories Kipling wittily supplies the answers to these and other questions. «Puck of Pook's Hill» relates how Dan and Una's magical meeting with Puck, the last of the People of the Hills, leads to their adventures with Romans and Crusaders, Saxons and Vikings... And later, in «Rewards and Fairies», the three meet an array of characters ranging from Iron Age warriors to 'Good Queen Bess' and Sir Francis Drake. In Kipling's rattling school yarn «Stalky & Co», Stalky, M'Turk and the Beetle are a trio of scallywags with a keen desire to break the rules, their unruly activities give the stories an enduring appeal to all children — especially those who have ever wilted beneath the stern glance of a peevish schoolmaster. Kipling's wry, sometimes tongue-in-cheek style will delight and entertain young readers while adults throughout the world will remember his stories with affection.» |
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Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859) were philologists and folklorists. The brothers rediscovered a host of fairy tales, telling of princes and princesses in their castles, witches in their towers and forests, of giants and dwarfs, of fabulous animals and dark deeds. Together with the well-known tales of 'Rapunzel', 'The Goose Girl', Sleeping Beauty', 'Hansel and Gretel' and 'Snow White', there are the darker tales such as 'Death's Messengers' which deserve to be better known, and which will appeal not only to all who are interested in the history of folklore, but also to all those who simply love good story-telling. |
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Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is famed for his magical stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, here illustrated throughout the inner pages by Sir John Tenniel's much loved drawings. However, inspired by the insatiable Victorian appetite for party games, tricks and conundrums, this eccentric and polymathical Englishman also wrote many other works of a humorous, witty, whimsical and nonsensical nature such as the mock-heroic nonsense verse The Hunting of the Snark, as well as dozens of other verses, stories, acrostics and puzzles, all of which are included in this volume. Oxford scholar, Church of England Deacon, University Lecturer in Mathematics and Logic, academic author of learned theses, gifted pioneer of portrait photography, colourful writer of imaginative genius and yet a shy and pedantic man, Lewis Carroll stands pre-eminent in the pantheon of inventive literary geniuses. |
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Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma — 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen — yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator. Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose. |
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Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930. It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century. |
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«Who was Nostradamus, and what faith should we place in his predictions? This book gives objective answers. It reveals that Michel de Nostredame, a 16th-century French doctor, was more Renaissance man than arcane magician — and that his prognostications can be compellingly astute. In this edition all of the cryptic short verses of Nostradamus's «Centuries» appear in the original French, with new translations. Uncanny prophecies such as those of the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler are examined in detail. Here too are interpretations of the many verses believed to augur future events. Editor Ned Halley works in fields of journalism as diverse as medicine, wine and business. He takes a Plain English approach to 'a subject far too often wreathed in language that seems calculated to obscure, rather than to demonstrate, the truth'.» |
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«William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of «Hamlet», «King Lear», «Othello» and «Macbeth» as well as the moving history plays and the comedies such as «A Midsummer Night's Dream», «The Taming of the Shrew» and «As You Like It» with their magical combination of humour, ribaldry and tenderness. This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as his longer poems «Venus and Adonis» and «The Rape of Lucrece».» |
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«William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of «Hamlet», «King Lear», «Othello», and «Macbeth» as well as the moving history plays and the comedies such as «A Midsummer Night's Dream», «The Taming of the Shrew» and «As You Like It» with their magical combination of humour, ribaldry and tenderness. This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as his longer poems «Venus and Adonis» and «The Rape of Lucrece».» |
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