Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation
William H. Gass
Delves into the mysteries of translation. As Gass discovers during his work on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, translation is an adventure into the depths of language and ourselves. Read an excerpt.
Knopf | Hardcover | 25.00 | 0-375-40312-4

Lives of the Poets
Michael Schmidt
Take a literary tour of English-writing poets from the 14th century to the present in this deeply enjoyable book. Filled with insight into the times in which these poets were living, this book enhances our understanding of the poems that resulted. Take a peek.
Knopf | Hardcover | 35.00 | 0-375-40624-7

Crux: The Letters of James Dickey
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman
An intriguing and enlightening collection of letters by James Dickey, a great poet, a legend of the reading circuit, and the writer of the novel Deliverence. From a 1959 letter: "For a long time I have been trying to do two things in poetry, both of which I have been told I should not do. The first is to get away, by whatever means, from the idea of a poem as objet d'art.... I have also been trying to assert connections in nature where none exists: to make the world do what I say, rather than what it actually does."
Knopf | Hardcover | 35.00 | 0-375-40419-8

Auden
Richard Davenport Hines
A masterful biography of one of the greatest English poets and most compelling literary figures of the 20th century, Auden is the first to take the full measure of the poet's achievements, his insatiable thirst for experience, his navigation between the needs of discipline and the lure of his addictions and lusts.
Pantheon | Hardcover | 30.00 | 0-679-42633-7

Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
Benita Eisler
Drawing on previously unavailable material-- including family papers only recently brought to light--Eisler offers us a more complex vision of Byron than any we've had before: a man who rose from the depths of poverty and the humiliation of childhood lameness to a pinnacle of success and fame unlike anything the world had ever seen, and whose bravura identity as renegade aristocrat, political revolutionary, mythic lover, and Romanticism's galvanizing hero and antihero was surpassed in brilliance only by his poetic genius.
Knopf | Hardcover | 35.00 | 49.00 | 0-679-41299-9

Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
Richard Holmes
"Dazzling. . . . Here is Coleridge, attractive and repellant, with all his seductive contradictions: the young man with his mountainous aspirations, his dreaminess . . . yammering poetry, pounding the turnpikes, dominating drawing-rooms; the foaming genius, messy with metaphysical secretions and uncontrollable speculations. Holmes has not merely reinterpreted Coleridge, he has re-created him, and his biography has the aura of fiction, the shimmer of an authentic portrait. [This is] a biography like few I have ever read." --James Wood, The Guardian (London)
Pantheon | Trade Paperback | 04/15/99 | 17.00 | 0.00 | 0-375-70540-6

Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
Richard Holmes
Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. As Holmes brings it vividly to life in these pages, we feel his hopeless heartaches, his moments of elation, his electrifying creativity and boundless energy, his unfailing ability to rescue himself from the darkest abyss. The result is a brilliantly animated, superbly detailed, wondrously provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist and an even more extraordinary human being.
Pantheon | Hardcover | 04/15/99 | 32.00 | 0.00 | 0-679-43847-5