Poems Of London

A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology of poems inspired by this storied city, from its teeming medieval streets to the multicultural metropolis it is today Poems of London covers a wide range of time and includes not only the pantheon of classic English poets, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot, but also tributes by notable visitors from all over, from Arthur Rimbaud to Samuel Beckett to Sylvia Plath, and contributions by an array of immigrants or the children of immigrants, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patience Agbabi, and recent Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo. All the famous sights of London, from the Thames to the Tower, are touched on in this vibrant collection, and denizens of its busy streets ranging from princes to pubgoers to pickpockets wander through these pages. The result is an enthralling portrait of an endlessly varied and fascinating place. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

This wonderful new edition of Poems on the Underground is published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Underground in 2013. Here 230 poems old and new, romantic, comic and sublime explore such diverse topics as love, London, exile, families, dreams, war, music and the seasons, and feature poets from Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley, Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott and a host of younger poets. It includes a new foreword and over two dozen poems not included in previous anthologies.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Distributor statement from label on back cover.

An illustrated anthology of poetry celebrating life in England's capital. 'Earth hath not anything to show more fair' said Wordsworth of London in 1802. Hundreds of years on, the same can still be said of Britain's largest metropolis. Favourite Poems of London is a wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating England's capital and life as a Londoner. Verses from our best-loved authors, such as William Wordsworth, William Blake and John Betjeman among others, are accompanied by beautiful illustrations – often taken from iconic tube posters – of London's famous sights, green parks and Londoners in their daily lives. Epic poems celebrating London's vast and majestic presence sit alongside Cockney ditties about pie, mash and jellied eels in this new collection. Celebrating every aspect of 'the big smoke' – from the Houses of Parliament and the Blitz spirit, through to red double-decker buses and infamous rainy English summers – this is the perfect gift for any Londoner or visitor to the city.

Spanning 500 years and representing nearly 20 different languages and cultures, this collection of poems about London includes works by Wordsworth, Blake and Lawrence, as well as less well-known figures such as Patience Agbabi, Talvikki Ansel and Rachel Castelete.