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A complete and unabridged e-edition of the collected verse of John Donne. Donne, 1572–1631, was born in London, England, and, as evidenced by the verse collected here, is one of the great English language poets and thinkers in modern history illuminating the human condition through a verse marked for its argument, metaphysical conceit, metaphorical illuminations, and deep passions, whether they be focussed on love, God (two of Donne's favorite foci), or some other theme. While his poetry is dense, it is also inspiring, wise, and an essential and vital piece in the evolution of western verse. Volume 6 in The Reader's Library Series. ISBN: 978-1-932023-48-0 https://www.facebook.com/williamralpheditions...

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"Batter my heart, three person’d God..." Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’rthrow me,’and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurpt Town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end. Reason your Viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue, Yet dearly’I love you and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy, Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you’enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me....

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Contents Introduction SONGS AND SONNETS The Flea The Good-Morrow Song ("Goe, and catch a falling starre...") Woman's Constancy The Undertaking The Sun Rising The Indifferent Love's Usury Canonization The Triple Fool Lovers' Infiniteness Song ("Sweetest Love, I doe not goe...") The Legacy A Feaver Air and Angels Breake of Day The Anniversary A Valediction of My Name, in the Window Twicknam Garden Valediction to His Book Community Love's Growth Love's Exchange Confined Love The Dream A Valediction of Weeping Love's Alchymy The Curse The Message A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day Being the Shortest Day Witchcraft by a Picture The Bait The Apparition The Broken Heart A Valediction Forbidding Mourning The Extasie Love's Deity Love's Diet The Will The Funeral The Blossom The Primrose, Being at Mountgomery Castle upon the Hill, on Which It Is Situate The Relique The Damp The Dissolution A Jeat Ring Sent Negative Love The Prohibition The Expiration The Computation The Paradox Farewell to Love A Lecture upon the Shadow EPIGRAMS Epigrams ELEGIES Elegie I Elegie II Elegie III El...

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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was worn in Edinburgh, Scotland, and suffered from frail health all through childhood, an affliction that would follow him into adulthood and manifest itself ultimately as tuberculosis. He initially set out to be a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1875, though he never practiced. He is best known for his tales Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though he wrote a number of other stories, excellent essays, and of course poems. Constantly searching for a climate that would ease his suffering, he died quite young at the age of 44 and was buried high on Mt. Vaea in his final home of Samoa, the site of which is immortalized in the poem “Requiem” contained within these pages. I was first introduced to his timeless A Child’s Garden of Verses by my mother as a child myself, and the simple, extremely perceptive moments beautifully rendered in Stevenson’s effortless cadences and perfect rhymes went a long way, I imagine, to making me believe from an early age that poetry was the best way to explain and discover everything, and subsequently made me want to be a poet mys...

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The Land of Nod From breakfast on through all the day At home among my friends I stay, But every night I go abroad Afar into the land of Nod.   All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do— All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams.   The strangest things are there for me, Both things to eat and things to see, And many frightening sights abroad Till morning in the land of Nod.   Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear....

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“Introduction A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES To Alison Cunningham Bed in Summer A Thought At the Seaside Young Night Thought Whole Duty of Children Rain Pirate Story Foreign Lands Windy Nights Travel Singing Looking Forward A Good Play Where Go the Boats? Auntie’s Skirts The Land of Counterpane The Land of Nod My Shadow System A Good Boy Escape at Bedtime Marching Song The Cow Happy Thought The Wind Keepsake Mill Good and Bad Children Foreign Children The Sun’s Travels The Lamplighter My Bed Is a Boat The Moon The Swing Time to Rise Looking-Glass River Fairy Bread From a Railway Carriage Winter-Time The Hayloft Farewell to the Farm Northwest Passage I. Good Night II. Shadow March III. In Port The Child Alone 1. The Unseen Playmate 2. My Ship and I 3. My Kingdom 4. Picture-Books in Winter 5. My Treasures 6. Block City 7. The Land of Story-Books 8. Armies in the Fire 9. The Little Land Garden Days 1. Night and Day 2. Nest Eggs 3. The Flowers 4. Summer Sun 5. The Dumb Soldier 6. Autumn Fires 7. The Gardener 8. Historical Associations Envoys 1. To Willie and Henrietta 2. To...

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential of all American poets. The first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS, his sole book which he would continue to revise over the course of his life expanding and rewriting it until the year of his death, appeared in 1855. This volume endeavors to recreate that debut edition as much as an e-book’s virtual typesetting will allow....

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I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.   I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.   Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.   The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.   The smoke of my own breath, Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs, “The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of the wind, A fe...

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Contents Introduction "Frontispiece" "Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson" "Original Title Page" "Entered according to Act of Congress..." "Preface" "Song of Myself" "A Song for Occupations" "To Think of Time" "The Sleepers" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Faces" "Song of the Answerer" "Europe the 72d and 73d Years of These States" "A Boston Ballad" "There Was a Child Went Forth" "Who Learns My Lesson Complete" "Great Are the Myths" About the Editor Also by William Ralph Press...

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A meticulously edited edition of John Keats’ verse collecting all of his poems sans his two long verse plays. Keats was born in London, England, on October 31, 1795. He dedicated his short life to the creation of poetry characterized by its sensuous and vivid imagery, classical themes, technical mastery and sincere and authentic emotional tenor. He died tragically young in 1821 of tuberculosis, a disease that had plagued his life since he took a walking tour of the Lake District in 1818. Volume 5 in The Reader's Library Series. ISBN: 978-1-932023-47-3 https://www.facebook.com/williamralpheditions...

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Ode to a Nightingale I My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains     My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains     One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,     But being too happy in thine happiness,—         That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,             In some melodious plot     Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,         Singest of summer in full-throated ease.   II O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been     Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green,     Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South,     Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,         With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,             And purple-stained mouth;     That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,         And with thee fade away into the forest dim:   III Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget     What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret     Here, where men sit and hear each ...

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Contents Introduction Imitation of Spencer On Peace On Death Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles’ Restoration, on Hearing Bells Ringing Song: Stay, Ruby Breasted Warbler, Stay Fill for Me a Brimming Bowl As from the Darkening Gloom a Silver Dove To Lord Byron To Chatterton Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison To Hope Ode to Apollo To Some Ladies On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies To Emma Woman! When I Behold Thee Flippant, Vain Sonnet to Solitude Epistle to George Felton Mathew To —— (Had I a Man's Fair Form...) To —— (Hadst Thou Liv'd in Days of Old...) I Am As Brisk Women, Wine, and Snuff Specimen of an Induction to a Poem Calidore To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent Oh! How I Love, on a Fair Summer's Eve To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses Happy Is England! I Could Be Content To My Brother George Epistle to My Brother George Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of Time! On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer Keen, Fitful Gusts Are Whisp’ring Here and There On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hou...

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is widely considered to be the best poet of the Augustan age, and perhaps English verse’s best satirist ever. Pope was mostly self-taught having been denied a formal protestant education because of his family’s Roman Catholic beliefs; he also suffered from the effects of Pott’s disease his entire life, which left him deformed and of small stature never growing past the height of four feet six inches. Despite these challenges, Pope flourished in English society and was likely its first professional literary writer having garnered significant income from the sales of books to the public as opposed to traditional patronages, capitalizing mostly on his excellent translations of Homer and an edited edition of Shakespeare. A close friend of Jonathan Swift in their famous Scriblerus Club, he was quite famous in his time, and while his reputation declined in the 19th century, he is now considered the most canonical poet of his era and the true master of the heroic couplet (followed closely by his predecessor, John Dryden) and English poetic satire. This edition of his poems collects all of his major work, and most...

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from "Essay on Criticism" “Tis hard to say if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But of the two less dangerous is th’ offence To tire our patience than mislead our sense: Some few in that, but numbers err in this; Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss; A fool might once himself alone expose; Now one in verse makes many more in prose.     ’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. In Poets as true Genius is but rare, True Taste as seldom is the Critic’s share; Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light, These born to judge, as well as those to write. Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well; Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true, But are not Critics to their judgment too? “    Yet if we look more closely, we shall find Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind: Nature affords at least a glimm’ring light; The lines, tho’ touch’d but faintly, are drawn right: But as the slightest sketch, if justly traced, Is by ill col’ring but the more disgraced, So by false learning is good sens...

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Introduction Ode on Solitude A Paraphrase (On Thomas à Kempis) To the Author of a Poem Entitled Successio The First Book of Statius’s Thebais Imitation of Chaucer Imitation of Spenser: The Alley Imitation of Waller: On a Lady Singing to Her Lute Imitation of Waller: On a Fan of the Author’s Design Imitation of Abraham Cowley: The Garden Imitation of Abraham Cowley: Weeping Imitation of Earl of Rochester: On Silence Imitation of Earl of Dorset: Artemisia Imitation of Earl of Dorset: Phryne Imitation of Dr. Swift: The Happy Life of a Country Parson Pastorals I. Spring; or, Damon II. Summer; or, Alexis III. Autumn; or, Hylas and Ægon IV. Winter; or, Daphne Windsor Forest Paraphrases from Chaucer January and May; or, The Merchant’s Tale The Wife of Bath The Temple of Fame Translations from Ovid Sappho to Phaon The Fable of Dryope Vertumnus and Pomona An Essay on Criticism Part I Part II Part III Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day Argus The Balance of Europe The Translator On Mrs. Tofts, a Famous Opera-Singer Epistle to Mrs. Blount, with the Works of Voiture Adriani Morientis Ad Animam Epistle to M...