Here are 200 of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the English language collected and arranged especially for Kindle readers. The design of this anthology is inspired by the structure of a sonnet, with 14 Poems for 14 Themes:
Love; Parting and Sorrow; Inspiration; Mystery and Enigma; Humour and Curiosities; Rapture; A Door Opens, A Door Closes; Memory; Tales and Songs; Nature; Cities; Solitude; Contemplation; and Animals. There are poems for every mood and occasion, and alongside the more famous works, are some lesser known gems of English poetry.
Included are masterpieces by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Christina Rossetti, and many other outstanding poets. Please view the preview of this book for a full listing.
At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful Kindle Books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between the poems. We regularly update the formatting of our books, to ensure they will always remain perfectly accessible on all Kindle models.
This book is part of the Best of Poetry series, which also includes:
The Best of Poetry: Shakespeare, Muse of Fire
The Best of Poetry: In the Blue and Silver Night
The Best of Poetry: A Young Person’s Book of Evergreen Verse
Foreword
Anthologies of English verse are as abundant as mushrooms after rain. So why create another?
Our defence amounts to this: the kind of anthology that we wanted to own did not exist.
Our aim has been to compile an intricately structured anthology of classic English verse, in which the poems are arranged so as to strike fire off one another, and thereby bring new light to familiar lines. We have placed Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” beside Hart Crane’s “Brooklyn Bridge”, so that each may ignite the other’s beauty. In the same vein, Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night” accompanies Thomas Hardy’s “Once at Swanage”, so that readers may discover and unravel the poems’ shared mysteries.
We wanted there to be a sense of inevitably in the structure of the anthology, as well as in the placement of the poems within it. This book is organised as a sort of sonnet sequence, with fourteen poems for fourteen themes. A two-poem prologue and epilogue bring the collection to exactly 200 poems. In selecting which poems to include, we have tried to present the best-loved poems in the English language alongside some less commonly anthologized masterpieces.
Each theme in this anthology is introduced by two or three short meditations on the nature of poetry. Taken together, these pensées give some idea of the beauty, enchantment, and richness that poetry can offer. But it is in the poems themselves that the real treasure is to be found. We hope you will enjoy reading them.
