"I feel that I have spent half my career with one or another Pelican Shakespeare in my back pocket. Convenience, however, is the least important aspect of the new Pelican Shakespeare series. Here is an elegant and clear text for either the study or the rehearsal room, notes where you need them and t[...]

Demonstrating a poet's imaginative ear and a critic's range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" with which poetry speaks to us. Through analysis of formal and rhetorical patterns in examples chosen from the whole spectrum of English and American poetry, Hollander descr[...]

From Homer and Virgil to Byron and Yeats, from Shelley and Whitman to Auden and Stevens, from ancient China's anonymous bards to Poland's Mickiewicz and Israel's Amichai, poets of all times, places, and sensibilities have been moved to write about war. Here are more than one hundred of their most me[...]

An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming m[...]

A ghoulish anthology of fantastical and ghostly poems by some of the world's finest poets spans some three thousand years of literary explorations of the supernatural in works by Homer, Ovid, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Virgil, Charles Baudelaire, Randall Jarrell, and James Merrill, among othe[...]

New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, "The Work of Poetry" surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to "A Child's Garden of Verses." By turns generous[...]

Poet, scholar, teacher, editor, and critic John Hollander has been a colossal presence in the American literary community for several decades. He is known for his mastery of prosody as well as for the wit, nuance, and charm of his poetry. Filled with literary, philosophical, and religious allusions,[...]