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Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385) is an epic poem written by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Composed in Middle English, Troilus and Criseyde is the story of two lovers forced apart by the Greek siege of Troy. Often considered Chaucer's finest work for its structural consistency and completeness, the poem adapts Homer's Iliad and other ancient sources which expand on its tradition to tell a Christian moral tale about the importance of faith and the sacred...
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A poet lives for more than three centuries, becomes a woman, and ages only twenty years in this classic fantastical work by the author of Mrs. Dalloway.
Orlando begins their story as a melancholy sixteen-year-old nobleman and poet who spends their days in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who takes a shine to them. Love, passion, and heartbreak guide Orlando's life through two more kings. In their thirties, Orlando becomes an ambassador to Turkey...
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The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words. The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third poetry collection.
"The Defeat of Youth" is a moving sonnet sequence on the passage of innocence to experience, on familiar transformation of love into lust....
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With satire, adventure, and imagination, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems explores subjects such as the supernatural, love, friendship, and nature. Featuring sixteen of Lewis Carroll's poems, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems has something to appeal to everyone. Among this collection is A Sea Dirge, in which the speaker, equipped with evocative figurative language, explains their contempt for the sea. In Echoes, a young girl discloses her encounter with...
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Presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan"...
27) Arrowsmith
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Arrowsmith tells the story of bright and scientifically minded Martin Arrowsmith of Elk Mills, Winnemac (the same fictional state in which several of Lewis's other novels are set), as he makes his way from a small town in the Midwest to the upper echelons of the scientific community at a prestigious foundation in New York City. Along the way he begins medical school. He becomes engaged to one woman, cheats on her with another woman, becomes engaged...
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Three Sisters (1900) is a drama in four acts by Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov. It was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, directed by acclaimed actor Konstantin Stanislavski-who also played the role of Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, a philosophizing artillery officer in love with middle Prozorov sister Masha. Reviews were mixed at first, but as the play continued to run, Three Sisters became a popular success,...
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The first book in this Elizabethan epic poem follows the adventures of the chivalrous Redcrosse Knight and his virtuous love Lady Una.
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene ushered in a new sensibility in English literature as the reunited country entered the seventeenth century. In his distinctive verse form-which came to be known as the Spenserian stanza-Spenser inspired his countrymen with tales of noble adventure, romance, and chivalry. This first...
30) Flame and shadow
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Flame and Shadow (1920) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fifth collection, published two years after she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, death, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Flame and Shadow revels in the mystery of existence itself. "What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, / That my songs do not show...
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King Lear is a prosperous but older man who plans to distribute his wealth among his three daughters in accordance to their declarations of love. Two shower him with compliments while the other is unable to participate in a false display of affection.
King Lear decides to step down from the throne and gift his daughters with the spoils of his kingdom. As a test, the size of their inheritance will correlate with how well they flatter him. The two...
33) Stray birds
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A collection of poems.
1
STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
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O TROUPE of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.
3
THE world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover.
It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.
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IT is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom....
34) The Aeneid
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"This new translation brings Virgil's masterpiece newly to life for English-language readers. It's the first in centuries crafted by a translator who is first and foremost a poet, and it is a glorious thing. David Ferry has long been known as perhaps our greatest contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius,...
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Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...
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This richly illustrated edition of Shakespeare's classic comedy in the New Folger Library features an accurate text in modern spelling and punctuation, scene-by-scene plot summaries and full explanatory notes, in-depth guides with tips on reading Shakespeare's language, and much more.
39) Julius Caesar
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Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.
40) Romeo and Juliet
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Romeo and Juliet was the first drama in English to confer full tragic dignity on the agonies of youthful love. The lyricism that enshrines their death-marked devotion has made the lovers legendary in every language that possesses a literature.