Poetry
The Rape of the Lock
The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany in May 17…
Job
The Book of Job (American Standard Version) is presented in forty-two chapters and is one of the Old Testament Wisdom Books. The narrative c…
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy (in Italian, Divina Commedia, or just La commedia or Comedia) is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri in the first deca…
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Wilde’s meditation on capital punishment, the Ballad of Reading Gaol comes after he was convicted and imprisoned under charges of gross inde…
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a profound exploration of love, beauty, and the human experience, encapsulated in 154 masterful poems. Written by t…
Jerusalem
The epic poem Jerusalem was in Blake's own opinion his masterpiece. It is the last of the great prophetic books. Originally produced as an e…
On the Nature of Things
Written in the first century b.C., On the Nature of Things (in Latin, De Rerum Natura) is a poem in six books that aims at explaining the Ep…
Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics
Sappho lived six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life.…
Sappho
Sappho lived in the Greek-speaking Aeolian islands off the coast of Turkey. She is one of the very few female poets from antiquity. Although…
The Prophet
The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was originally…
Hymns and Spiritual Songs
In sending forth a new collection of Hymns, I feel it necessary to preface the work by a few words of explanation. The volume now in the re…
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."The Marriage of Heaven & Hell is William Blake’s masterpiece – a piously bl…
The Psalms and Odes of Solomon
One of the Pseudepigrapha, the Psalms of Solomon is a group of eighteen psalms (religious songs or poems) that are not part of any scriptura…
Diary of an Old Soul
George MacDonald, a Scottish pastor, wrote these short poems, one for each day of the year, to help him with the severer misfortune he was e…
The Kipling Reader
These are selections of Kipling's writings; some poems, some fiction, some history but all by the master storyteller himself. Rikki-Tikki-Ta…
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical foment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution.…
An Essay on Criticism
An Essay on Criticism is a foundational work of literary criticism by Alexander Pope, blending poetry and philosophical reflection. Written …
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
An aging minstrel seeks who hospitality at Newark Castle and in recompense tells a tale of a sixteenth-century Border feud. In the poem, Lad…
Spirits in Bondage
Spirits in Bondage is C.S. Lewis’s first book and the first of his works to be available in the public domain. It was released in 1919 unde…
Holy Sonnets
John Donne (1572 – March 31, 1631) was a Jacobean poet and preacher, representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works, nota…