Poetry

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was one of the most outstanding Portuguese poets of his time and of all time, and this celebrated poem Tabacaria, a complex, melancholic and inspired meditation, is one of his most renowned works, without a doubt one of the most memorable poetic texts of the 20th Century.
Sombre in tone and content, its richness and scope are palpable in practically every line – we were particularly marked by the phrase "And now there’s no beggar I don’t envy simply for not (…)

Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) , who lived all his life in the ancient Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most important poets of modern times.
His legacy has been celebrated by writers and poets around the world, notably by Laurence Durell in his monumental Alexandria Quartet (1960) and by the Nobel Prize for Literature laureat J.M. Coetzee with his eponymous novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
This distinguished translation of Waiting for the Barbarians (1904), (…)

There is surely a consensus among cognoscenti that famous texts such as François Villon’s La ballade des pendus, (“Song of the Hanged Men”), Lamartine’s Le lac, (“The Lake”), Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (‘The Drunken Boat”) and Apollinaire’s Le pont Mirabeau (“The Mirabeau Bridge") are all among the greatest poetic texts in the language of Rabelais, Ronsard and Racine.
You will find them all here, transposed into the language of Dickens and Dylan, as well as twenty-nine other texts worthy of (…)

The Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) was a period of extraordinary flourishing of the Chinese civilisation in all domains, notably art and literature.
No other civilisation has ever placed poetry on such an elevated pedestal in its scale of values : everyone with an education wrote poetry from the Emperor on downwards, and the most famous poets were honoured in the streets and in the palaces like the stars of popular culture are today.
A thousand years later, when the Qing dynasty published in (…)

“Lyrical Ballads”, no doubt the most famous book of poetry in the English language, was jointly published in 1798 by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
This book, generally considered to have ushered in the age of romanticism in English literature, contained two of the greatest poems in the language, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey [1] and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The version of Coleridge’s masterpiece that is generally available (…)

Albrecht Haushofer, a Professor of Political Geography specialising in oriental culture at the University of Berlin, was arrested for complicity in the failed coup of July 20, 1944 and interned in the central Berlin prison of Moabit that had been taken over by the Gestapo for the internment, questioning and execution of the thousands of officers, professors, intellectuals and political activists who had been associated directly or directly in that attempt to overthrow the Nazi regime and (…)

In early 1859 the English erudite Edward Fitzgerald, a retired Cambridge graduate with independent means, published anonymously his translation of selected stanzas of the 12-Century Persian poem “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam, who ”was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half of our Eleventh, and died within the First Quarter of our Twelfth Century.”
The work gained little notice at first, even among Fitzgerald’s close circle of literary friends that included William Thackeray and (…)

This poem is arguably the greatest lyrical poem in the English language.
It was first published in 1798 in what is probably the most famous book of poetry in the language : Lyrical Ballads, which, in addition to ground-breaking works by Wordsworth exploring the speech and the social situation of the common man in the framework of a nature-centred vision, also contained works by by his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, notably his great epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . (…)

The criteria for inclusion in this anthology are quite straightforward : the poems have to approach that superior and very rare level of excellence and poetic power epitomised by Wordsworth’s sublime Tintern Abbey, by Coleridge’s epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and by François Villon’s immortal La Ballade des Pendus ; they have to maintain their exceptional level of excellence throughout, from start to end ; they have to be of a length whereby they can be memorised by the average (…)