This all-new Signet Classic contains many of T.S. Eliot's most important early poems, leading to perhaps his greatest masterpiece, The Waste land, which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular cu[...]

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form[...]

When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the futu[...]

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes[...]