Let Us Go Then

T. S. Eliot's timeless modernist masterpiece, visually reimagined This fully illustrated book explores Eliot's themes of indecision and isolation, as well the overwhelming desire for connection, an often overlooked element of the poem. Printed on beautiful matte paper, this petite gift book is perfect for poetry and art lovers alike. The Obvious State Classics Collection is an evolving series of visually reimagined beloved works that speaks to contemporary readers. The pocket-sized, collectable editions feature the selected works of celebrated authors such as T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Sara Teasdale and Henry David Thoreau.

Let Us Go Then, You and I is a new edition of T. S. Eliot's selected poems, published to celebrate his nomination as the 'Nation's Favourite Poet' in a BBC poll for National Poetry Day 2009.

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot--from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied." Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

A collection of poems, some of which had first appeared in Poetry, Blas, Others, The Little Review, and Arts and Letters.

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.

Few books of poems in our time have been as well received as Ciaran Carson s For All We Know, its haunting power acknowledged by a host of welcoming readers and judges. Now, just one year on (and following the publication also of Collected Poems), this ever protean writer weaves a slower, subtler spell with a profusion of spare, sinuous, riddling shards of memory and insight. In three interlinked movements On the Night Watch fathoms the depths of a well and a mine to discover what can and cannot be said. Exploring the very grammar of English, it remains alert to all that stays unspoken. Exposed to the anxieties of circumstance a siege of sickness the poems trace the storms and calms of waiting, not knowing, from fear to the reprieve from fears, and find in the small hours the chink of birdsong and chinks of light. As the falling leaves / fall on / the fallen leaves // the rain beats / on the rain these poems accumulate in a work of characteristically brave adventure.

Presents over fifty poems written by the author in his twenties, including early drafts of famous poems, and extensive critical notes on the works.

The first comprehensive treatment of how "an American poet so profoundly shaped or affected the modern British novel," this--in the words of James E. Miller, Jr.--details "an extraordinary and even exciting literary fact, worthy of full documentation and exploration. "The book begins with an introduction describing how The Waste Land blew into England in 1922, as William Empson said, "not unlike an east wind." Although the critics disagree over what the poem means, all writers since 1922 have felt its influence in some degree, even if only in rejecting it. The author then traces echoes of The Waste Land in 17 major British novelists, confining himself to cases where the evidence is too strong to be explained as coincidence. The authors are divided into three groups. Part I assesses the poem's early impact, as seen in the work of writers already established at the time of its publication. Novelists discussed in this section include E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. There is also a chapter on Richard Aldinton that contains a fascinating revaluation, based on extensive research, of Aldington's personal quarrel with Eliot. Part II examines the different sort of influence The Waste Land exerted on novelists who came to prominence in the decade before World War II. For these writers--among them Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene--the poem was a basic part of their literary education, and was therefore woven more deeply, and frequently, into the fabric of their work. Part III focuses on two writers of the postwar era, Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess. With the rest of their generation they had been forced to recognize a horror more oppressive than the banality and blight of Eliot's "Unreal City," yet they found in the The Waste Land images and meanings so compelling that the poem retains an undeniable presence in their work. In his conclusion, Dr. Crawford attributes The Waste Land's uniquely powerful impact to four qualities: its timing in providing "prototypes for almost every modern problem"; its challenging elusiveness; its ambiguity, which "allows every reader to draw his own conclusion regarding the poem's meaning"; and its haunting symbols and descriptions. The "rhetoric of fiction" is especially sensitive to such qualities. The result is the British novelists "have helped to 'define' The Waste Land by their varied use of it."

Catching Life by the Throat unites the sound, sense, and sensibility that lie at the heart of great poetry. It features eight great poets, with brief, accessible essays concerning their life and work and a selection of their poems, and it is accompanied by an 80-minute CD recorded live at the British Library: Ralph Fiennes reading Auden, Edward Fox reading Eliot, Roger Moore reading Kipling, Harold Pinter reading Larkin, and more. Whether you believe (like Robert Frost, who inspired the title) that poetry is a way of "taking life by the throat" or (like T. S. Eliot) that it "is one person talking to another," nobody does it better than the poets featured in this book. For a novice discovering the rich heritage of English-language verse or a seasoned poetry reader, Catching Life by the Throat is an extraordinary introduction to eight iconic poets.