"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-- and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry...

Presents the complete text of this patriotic song that was written for a Broadway musical, chronicles the history of the American flag, and recounts the life of the song's composer, George M. Cohan. Includes instructions for making a flag wind sock.

"A new biography of John Keats that uncovers the reality of his imagination within the context of his time"-- "The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone-- 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'-- seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of twenty-five, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though...

Presents the prose translation of the Old English epic that Tolkien created as a young man, along with selections from lectures on the poem he gave later in life and a story and poetry he wrote in the style of folklore on the poem's themes.

Focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and...