The Poetry - Volume II - Under The Sycamores & Other Poems

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Sinopsis

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.
Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840. When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.
However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.
In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together. The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum. Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced.
Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career. Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’. It won her both recognition and best-seller status.
Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.
In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine. This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.
Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.
Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.
After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised. But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline. In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

Disponible desde: 04/01/2019.

Poesía y teatro

Otros libros que te pueden interesar

Timons of Athens

William Shakespeare

William Squire, Corin Redgrave, Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn perform Shakespeare's play about the fortunes of an Athenian named Timon

Ver libro

The Interrogation - Poems

Michael Bazzett

This surreal, darkly humorous, and relentlessly probing poetry collection resides at “the disorienting juncture between fairy tale and nightmare” (Publishers Weekly). 
 
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, Michael Bazzett’s The Interrogation is an unsparingly honest catechism of the self. In the title poem, a speaker—at once questioner and questioned—insistently asks: Who? What? Where? Why? Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect? 
 
These poems read like disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. In them, we are escorted to dreamlike cities, brought into the rich earth under a simple mattress, and drawn inside the mind, where “Nobody fails at meditation / like I do.”

Ver libro

Robert Louis Stevenson's...

Robert Louis Stevenson

David Balfour has never had an adventure, never sailed the high sea, nor fought in a battle - that changes after the death of his parents. Now he must collect his inheritance from his father's younger brother, and assume his station as man of wealth and standing, but that is not as simple as it sounds. He must first survive and outwit his treacherous uncle to gain what is rightfully his.

Ver libro

The Poetry of Samuel Taylor...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21st, 1772 in Ottery St Mary in Devon.
As a child he was an early and devoted reader and, after being schooled at Christ's Hospital, a charity school, he attended, from 1791, Jesus College, Cambridge and the following year won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode on the slave trade.
He was great friends with the poet Robert Southey, indeed they formed a plan, soon abandoned, in 1795, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilds of Pennsylvania. But the same year the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker and, of course, went on to be part of the Lake Poets movement along with Wordsworth.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age.
In the autumn he and Wordsworth left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way immersing himself in both German philosophy and the language, which later proved invaluable for his translations.
In 1800, he returned to England and settled with his family at Keswick in the Lake District, near to where Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was beset by marital problems, illnesses, a growing opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers, all of which fuelled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies. He abandoned his family to Southey's care and departed on new travels.
Between 1810 and 1820, this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often considered, gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures from the winter of 1810–11 a series on Shakespeare and Milton. Although he rarely prepared anything other than loose notes and was inclined to digress, these lectures were a huge literary event and success.
By this time Coleridge was dependent on opium and by 1817 his solution was to live in Highgate under the watchful eye of physician James Gillman where his dependency was somewhat controlled and his output of work could continue. These included his 23 volume Biographia Literaria, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1826).
He died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure and a lung disorder together with the long term effects of opium.
This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.

Ver libro

Rhyme A Dozen A - 12 Poets 12...

Emma Lazarus, Ann Plato,...

‘A dime a dozen’ as known in America, is perhaps equal to the English ‘cheap as chips’ but whatever the lingua franca of your choice in this series we hereby submit ‘A Rhyme a Dozen’ as 12 poems on many given subjects that are a well-rounded gathering, maybe even an essential guide, from the knowing pens of classic poets and their beautifully spoken verse to the comfort of your ears. 
 
1 - A Rhyme A Dozen - 12 Poems, 12 Poets, 1 Topic - America - An Introduction 
2 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus 
3 - The Natives of America by Ann Plato 
4 - America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates 
5 - Bury Me In a Free Land by Frances E W Harper 
6 - A Nation's Strength by Ralph Waldo Emerson 
7 - To America by James Weldon Johnson 
8 - The Crowd at the Ball Game by William Carlos Williams 
9 - Harlem by Langston Hughes 
10 - Wild Peaches by Elinor Wylie 
11 - The Railway Train by Emily Dickinson 
12 - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver by Edna St Vincent Millay 
13 - I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman

Ver libro

Black Words Matter - Poets From...

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston...

This anthology focuses on African-American poets. We start in the 18th century and end with the Harlem Renaissance. Many poets featured are, and were, rarely heard and have been painfully neglected. To be of colour was deemed at best to be second class so few of our poets had the privileges most of us take for granted or a means to market. Down the ages they illuminate the stain on our humanity and its ever-repeating cycle.
Over ages, eons and countless generations humanity has sought to better itself. Ideas and cultures have sprung forth creating fertile conditions for change and advancement. We have gathered together as families, clans, tribes and nations in the clear knowledge that together more can be achieved for the individual. New systems have evolved, waxed and waned, been replaced or discarded by bright shiny new ones.

From afar the chances of humanity bettering itself must seem promising. But today's generations find themselves searching not only for answers from others but also from themselves, for solutions to turn a world where privilege, wealth and power reside with the few to be the right of the many. These unequal times will not give way easily. Entrenched interests will promise change and deliver little. This is the real history of the human race. We will claim that education, health care and jobs are for everyone and yet continue to mis-educate, to ignore primary care and offer jobs that even a robot would think twice about.

Those oppressed by race, creed, gender or colour will find the invisible walls of the status quo difficult to overcome. But there is hope - if we collectively want action. When we don’t merely call for that change but when we demand that change from ourselves, and from society. When we charge our political leaders to serve our interests rather than their own.

We may be created equal but society, and ourselves, sort, layer and assemble us all into groups, those it can keep underfoot and those who will have an unequal share. Real change requires all of us to change, to recognise that equal opportunity starts from equal access to resources. We need to praise ourselves less and provoke ourselves to do more, together. If the pain is shared the rewards can be shared.

This volume does not dwell only on equality but covers a very wide range of subjects from recognised masters of the craft such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Phyllis Wheatley to lesser known poets like Mary E Tucker and Charles Lewis Reason.

The reality is that we are more interested in changing our phones than changing our attitudes and the real changes that will bring. Both can be done in an instant. In an era of disposable everything we stick rigidly to keeping what we have and yet, bleat that oppression is wrong. Fair-weather activists. The news cycle will pass. So does the moment…..until the next time.

In this collection of poems poets down the ages illuminate the stain on our humanity and its ever-repeating cycle. They call and illustrate the need for change.

It's an enduring problem that seeks sensible and enduring solutions.

If it be our will both we and society can change.
They call and illustrate the need for change.

Ver libro