As a child Iain Crichton Smith spoke Gaelic in his village on the island of Lewis. At school in Stornoway he spoke English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of...

This is the first of the monumental three-volume "Complete Poems of Robert Graves", edited by Dunstan Ward and the poet's widow Beryl Graves. It restores hundreds of poems that Graves omitted from the canon or overlooked in his continual refinements...

Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishing popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges...

Many of the poems in E. A. Markham's sixth collection reveal a sense of disquiet which ranges in tone from the comic to the sombre. Yet the overall feel of the book is of something intimate, personal and celebratory, which overrides those darker unde...

Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced – a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly... This is the persona whose voice perm...

Luis de Gongora is Spain's greatest poet of the Baroque period. He was much admired by Lorca, and Roy Campbell described him as "a symbolist who contains the whole of Mallarme and a lot more besides, a symbolist three hundred years before his time"....

"Poems: Selected traces" over half a century of C. H. Sisson's work, starting with poems written on a troopship and in Bengal and ending on home ground in Somerset. His beginnings were "without facility, and when I was forced into verse it was throug...

The ever-popular novelist and story-teller Robert Graves wrote fascinating and durable stories, here collected together in a single volume for the first time by the poet's daughter Lucia Graves.

Michelangelo's poems are like the letters of other artists: they range from formal words of thanks to passionate arguments; they flatter patrons, address lovers – and God; they reflect on art and on Michelangelo's own physical and metaphysical studie...

P. J. Kavanagh's poems are filled with praise, with the minute observations that transform a mood, or the dazzling recollection that can change the heart. "If description is revelation", wrote Derek Mahon in the Irish Times, "his revelatory gift is p...