Compiled and with an Introduction by PADRAIC COLUM
From a lifetime of writing, reading, and enjoying poetry, the distinguished Irish author Padraic Colum has selected more than eighty of his favorite poems for this anthology. "The readers and learners who have been kept in mind," he writes in his introduction, "are those whose twentieth birthday is still before them."
The result is a superb and refreshingly imaginative anthology of poems ripe with meaning for the reader who is just developing a taste for poetry. Here, in one handsome volume, are poems forged of striking images, colorful action, and spirited adventure, lilting rhymes and rhythms that beg to be memorized and cherished.
Mr. Colum's favorites range from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley to T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, e. e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas.
Included are brief notes illuminating the historical background of fourteen of the poems, an index of poets, and an index of first lines. Illustrated with early nineteenth- century fine-line wood engravings, the book is altogether beautiful—to look at, to read, to remember.
—from the dust jacket
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