A Raisin In The Sun

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."--The New York Times

Selected Poems

One of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter poems such as 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Tintern Abbey', 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Michael'. Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth's astonishing range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed his work.

Selected Poems

The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.

Selected Poems

This selection gives equal weight to the two aspects of Robert Burns's reputation, as a lyricist and as a much-loved Scottish poet. Placing works in probable order of composition, it includes lyrics to his most well known songs, such as the nostalgic Auld Lang Syne, the romantic A Red, Red Rose, and the patriotic Scots What Hae. As a poet, Burns wrote with deceptive simplicity and imaginative sympathy, and demonstrated enormous range - from comic dramatic monologues such as Holy Willie's Prayer, which mocks hypocrisy, to narratives including the celebrated Tam O' Shanter, about the ghostly visions of a drunk.

Poems And Prose (Penguin Classics)

Dazzling in its prosodic innovations, such as the 'sprung rhythm' he pioneered, and wide-ranging in its complexity and metaphysical interest. The Penguin Classics edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems and Prose is selected and edited with an introduction by W.H. Gardner. Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Jesuit order the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wishes of my superiors'. The poems, letters and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life, and published posthumously in 1918. His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice.

Ghosts And Other Plays

With three plays focusing on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them, Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and Other Plays is translated with an introduction by Peter Watts in Penguin Classics. In Ghosts, Osvald Alving returns home only to discover the truth about the father he always looked up to, and learns the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. It was Ibsen's most provocative drama, stripping away the surface of a middle-class family to expose layers of hypocrisy and immorality. A Public Enemy sets two brothers against each other when one wishes to make public the facts about the polluted water in the public baths of their home town. And When We Dead Wake tells of an artist meeting an old lover by chance and rejecting his wife, in a symbolic exploration of Ibsen's own literary life and the sacrifices he made in his work.

Selected Poems

Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should ‘be among the English poets after my death’. This wide-ranging selection of Keats’s poetry contains youthful verse, such as his earliest known poem ‘Imitation of Spenser’; poems from his celebrated collection of 1820 - including ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Hyperion’ - and later celebrated works such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Also included are many poems considered by Keats to be lesser work, but which illustrate his more earthy, playful side and superb ear for everyday language.

Selected Poems and Prose

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems “Prometheus Unbound” and “Adonais,” an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “Mont Blanc,” and “Ode to the West Wind.” This comprehensive and informative new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary, and idealistic.

Selected Poems

The poems of John Milton (1608-74) have inspired readers for generations and the selection in this new edition spans his entire career, from his earliest works to the magnificent epics of his later life. The devotional ???On the Morning of Christ???s Nativity???, his first great poem, anticipates the probing religious questions of Paradise Lost. Works such as ???L???Allegro??? and ???Il Penseroso??? consider divisions of loyalties, while ???A Masque??? (???Comus???) explores Milton???s great theme of temptation, and the pastoral elegy ???Lycidas??? contemplates mortality and the meaning of human life. This volume includes considerable selections from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - Milton???s late epics on the Fall of Man and Christ???s temptation in the wilderness - and the complete Samson Agonistes, in which the great hero undergoes a profound crisis of faith in his final hours.

The School For Scandal And Other Plays

The three plays collected in this volume demonstrate Sheridan's unerring ability to create unrivalled comedy out of ingenious plots, witty repartee, farcical situations and flamboyant characters. And while he never overtly moralizes, Sheridan uses brilliant comedy to deflate hypocrisy and satirize the manners of his age. In The Rivals, Captain Absolute becomes his own rival for the hand of Lydia Languish - wooing her under another name, while her aunt, the verbally inept Mrs Malaprop, wishes her to marry the real Captain. School for Scandal continues the theme of imposture when Sir Oliver tests his nephews by appearing to them in disguise, and learns that reputation and the approval of society are of little value. And The Critic, featuring the pompous Puff and the arrogant Sneer, is a mocking depiction of the theatre, playwrights and, of course, critics.

The Theban Plays

The legends surrounding the royal house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create a powerful trilogy of mankind's struggle aginst fate.KING OEDIPUS tells of a man who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he doesn't realise he has committed, and then inflicts a brutal punishment on himself. It is a devastating portrayl of a ruler brought down by his own oath. OEDIPUS AT COLONUS provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while ANTIGONE depicts the fall of the next generation through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident in his own authority.

Selected Poems

As Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson's spellbinding poetry epitomized the Victorian age, and Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ricks. 'Into the jaw of Death Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred' The works in this volume trace nearly sixty years in the literary career of one of the nineteenth century's greatest poets, and show the wide variety of poetic forms he mastered. This selection gives some of Tennyson's most famous works in full, including Maud, depicting a tragic love affair, and In Memoriam, a profound tribute to his dearest friend. Excerpts from Idylls of the King show a lifelong passion for Arthurian legend, also seen in the dream-like The Lady of Shalot and in Morte d'Arthur. Other works respond to contemporary events, such as Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, written in Tennyson's official role as Poet Laureate, or the patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade, while Locksley Hall provides a Utopian vision of the future, and the late poem Crossing the Bar is a haunting meditation on his own mortality. In his introduction, Christopher Ricks discusses aspects of Tennyson's life and works, his revisions of his poems, and his friendship with Arthur Hallam. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading and notes.

Selected Poems

Writer and religious rebel, William Blake sowed the seeds of Romanticism in his innovative poems concerning faith and the vision that inspired him throughout his remarkable life. Whether describing his own spirituality, the innocence of youth, or the corruption caused by mankind, his writings depict a world in which spirits dominate and the mind is the gateway to Heaven. Presenting many of Blake???s major works in their complete texts, alongside extensive passages from such poems as "Jerusalem" and "The Gates of Paradise," this collection spans his entire poetic life, from the exquisite lyrics of Poetic Sketches to Songs of Innocence and Experience???a compelling exploration of good and evil. Together, they illuminate a self-made realm that has fascinated artists and poets as diverse as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats, and Ginsberg. This is the perfect introduction to Blake???s unforgettable poetry.

The Canterbury Tales

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight???s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath???s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. Rich and diverse, The Canterbury Tales offer us an unrivalled glimpse into the life and mind of medieval England.

Selected Poems

One of England???s preeminent poets, John Donne???s poems are among the most passionate, profound, and spiritual in the English language. This rich representation reflects the wide diversity of his poetry. From such witty items as ???The Flea,??? which transforms the image of a louse into something marvelous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigor into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators

Neglected Poems

You gave me the earth on which I could build a home good enough for you to live in. Come, when you find time from all your other chores. Maybe on some weekend, come!'. After Selected Poems, a collection of some of his best poetry was extremely well received, Gulzar has chosen to present his next sixty poems in an inimitable way, labelling them Neglected Poems. These poems represent Gulzar at his creative and imaginative best, as he meditates on nature, delves into human psychology and confronts the most telling moments of everyday life.

Green Poems

"???On the branches of these wild plants Some words occasionally sprout But never a full poem . . .??? One of the country???s best-loved poets and lyricists, Gulzar is renowned for his inimitable way of seeing things, his witty expressions, his quirky turns of phrase. All these creative talents come into play in delightful, unexpected ways in his new bilingual collection Green Poems, which celebrates his innate connection with nature. Gulzar writes about rivers, forests, mountains; snow, rain, clouds; the sky, the earth and space; a familiar tree, a disused well; Kullu, Manali, Chamba, Thimpu. Like glimpses of nature, the poems are often short, an image captured in a few words. And sometimes the image gives rise to a striking thought: ???When I pass through the forest I feel my ancestors are around me . . .??? For those new to Gulzar???s work as well as his many fans, Green Poems will prove to be a true joy."

Me And My Plays

"Mahesh Dattani???s work has shaped contemporary English theatre in India over the past twenty-five years, boldly exploring themes like homosexuality, religious fanaticism, child sexual abuse and gender bias while also raising the bar for theatrical innovation. In Me and My Plays, he eloquently reflects on the highs and lows of surviving in a system largely indifferent to professional theatre. Included in this edition are Where Did I Leave My Purdah?, which explores the life and travails of Nazia, a feisty actress now in her eighties, who is forced to confront her past demons when she attempts to stage a comeback, and The Big Fat City, a black comedy about the residents of an apartment complex in Mumbai who unwittingly become accomplices to a murder. Intense and hard-hitting, both plays deal with the lies that simmer beneath the surface of our daily lives. "

Selected Poems

Jibanananda Das???s lyricism is unparalleled in Bengali literature. His early poems are vivid, eloquent celebrations of the beauty of Bengal; his later works, written in the 1940s and 50s, are darker, comments on political issues and current affairs like the Second World War, the Bengal Famine of ???43 and Hindu???Muslim riots at the time of Partition. Born in 1899, Jibanananda belonged to a group of poets who tried to shake off Tagore???s poetic influence. While he is best known for poetry that reveals a deep love for nature and rural landscapes, tradition and history, Jibanananda is also strikingly urban, and introspective, his work centring on themes of loneliness, depression and death. He was a master of word-images, and his unique poetic idiom drew on tradition but was startlingly new. Jibanananda died in a tram accident in 1954. His Shrestha Kavita (Best Poems) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955.

Selected Poems

A major poet in English, Kamala Das's taboo-breaking work explores themes of love and betrayal, the corporeal and the spiritual, while celebrating female sexuality and remaining deeply rooted in the poet's ancestral tradition and landscape.