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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. Rightly regarded as a major American poet, her life was sheltered, introverted, and reclusive. Despite writing over 1800 poems, only a dozen or so were published during her lifetime. Her structures and wordings are at times difficult to get to grips with, though recurring themes of religion and death certainly shadow many of her works.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21st, 1772, in Ottery St Mary in Devon. As a child he was an early and devoted reader, and after being schooled at Christ's Hospital, a charity school, he attended, from 1791, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the following year won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode on the slave trade. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.

Night. The day has gone. Departed. And the dark embrace, the inky shadows of night descend. For many a time to unwind and slumber. For some a nagging doubt that all is not well. That some primeval and primordial happening may yet go bump in the night. But for our poets the night is a time of wonder and imagination as well as many other emotions and feelings. Among our ranks of gloried talents are Keats, Coleridge, William Morris, DH Lawrence, Whitman, Longfellow and many more besides. Their descriptions capture what they see and feel as perhaps only a poet can.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 25th May 1803, the son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. Emerson was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood. His father died before Emerson was eight, and the young boy was raised by his mother and other female members of the family. Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine. In October 1817 at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College.

Alexander Pope was born on May 21st, 1688 into a Catholic family in London. Over the years and centuries since his death, Pope’s work has been in and out of favour, but with this distance he is now truly recognised as one of England’s greatest poets. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.

I should be whispering this because Halloween is almost upon us. A time of Witches, Ghouls and Hauntings and all kinds of scary things that come out the evening before All Saints Day to wreak havoc... I'm glad you're listening so let us begin

In 1667, Dryden published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. This work established him as the pre-eminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate in 1668 and a couple of years later, historiographer royal (1670), as his talent encompassed many forms; from poetry to plays to translations. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697).

Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was born on August 12th, 1880 to wealthy parents who separated while she was still an infant. Her parents thereafter paid little attention to her. Hall was educated privately, and then at King’s College London. Later she travelled to Europe, settling in Dresden, Germany. With the death of her paternal grandfather she inherited a large estate and was then able to live as she pleased. In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the 23 year age difference.

The seas and oceans have a mystical power over us: From a playful day at the beach to the hysterical waves of a storm, this ever-changing element evokes both beauty and fear; its great mass, its shimmering beauty, its raging howl and all in colours from blue to grey to green and crystal clear. In these collections of verse our poets - including Tennyson, Swinburne, Keats, Shelley, and many others - explore the relationship between ourselves and the great mystical waters.

The seas and oceans have a mystical power over us: From a playful day at the beach to the hysterical waves of a storm, this ever-changing element evokes both beauty and fear. Its great mass, its shimmering beauty, its raging howl, and all in colours from blue to grey to green and crystal clear. In these collections of verse our poets - including Tennyson, Swinburne, Keats, Shelley, and many others - explore the relationship between ourselves and the great mystical waters.

I should be whispering this because Halloween is almost upon us. A time of Witches, Ghouls and Hauntings and all kinds of scary things that come out the evening before All Saints Day to wreak havoc... I'm glad you're listening so let us begin.

The Elizabethan age had almost departed, and the world had seen the rise of great European empires that continued to hunt with mischief between themselves as they traversed the globe in search of more spoils and territories. In England the Civil War had brought about the will of Parliament and the replacement of the Crown as the governing body. But with these Puritan times, and the subsequent Restoration, poetry had entered a golden age. John Milton, John Dryden and Ben Jonson are but a few of the luminaries whose great verse followed in the wake of the immortal William Shakespeare.

Keats. A short life but a legacy of works that few, if any, can rival. And of course his end was to be tragically Romantic. Keats was returning one night to his home in Hampstead when he coughed. He coughed a single drop of blue blood upon his hand and said, ‘I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, it is my death warrant, I must die’. And so it was that tuberculosis took its slow, devastating hold.

Life is frenetic. Everything is running faster which usually means we are running later. Everything should have been done 5 minutes ago or better still yesterday. We are slowly falling behind, overwhelmed by busy lives in an ever-exacting world. In these more modern times, time is everything. There’s never enough of it. Classic poets down the decades and centuries have wisely observed that there are many things, both great and small, that bring a sense of stillness, an aura of calm, a chance to re-engage with our feelings and emotions purely by taking time for moments that matter.

The most enduring and popular theme of poems and poets is that of love. Love changes; its rhythms pause and pulse on the tiniest of things and the biggest of thrills. Within its shades all other feelings, all other emotions, gently reside, waiting for their moment. In these 50 poems, the many, many shades of love reveal themselves.

As private as she was eccentric, Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime. Most of her work, much of which dealt with themes of death and immortality, was published posthumously, to mixed reviews. But it would be her unconventional poetic style, which was most criticized early on, that would ultimately gain her recognition as one of the greatest American poets of all time. Here, a lovely sampling of the poems of Emily Dickinson is presented for your listening pleasure.

Amidst all our dreams and ambitions from cradle to grave is the wanderlust of travel. To see the world, to experience different cultures and new lands.

Amidst all our dreams and ambitions from cradle to grave is the wanderlust of travel. To see the world, to experience different cultures and new lands.

Today perhaps we all agree that youth is spoilt, ill-disciplined and in search of constant and instant gratification. No matter how much we love them, our children, as they mature from child to youth, are pampered. A century ago, and even further back, even the most privileged of youth was rarely indulged. In this volume we look at those years of youth through the eyes and pens of classic poets. They reveal times of hardship, of fear, of love and loss.

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1st 1819, the third of eight children. At the age of seven, Melville contracted scarlet fever which was to permanently diminish his eyesight. At this time Melville was described as being 'very backwards in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension.' His father died when he was 12, leaving the family in very straitened times. Just 14, Melville took a job in a bank paying $150 a year that he obtained via his uncle Peter Gansevoort, who was one of the directors of the New York State Bank.