Great Poetry

Articles in this section

• "Sonnets From the Prison of Moabit" (1944-45) by Albrecht Haushofer - a modern triumph of the human spirit

  13 April 2019 by Albrecht Haushofer

  Albrecht Haushofer, a Professor of Political Geography specialising in oriental culture at the University of Berlin, was arrested for complicity in the failed coup of July 20, 1944 and interned in the central Berlin prison of Moabit that had been taken over by the Gestapo for the internment, (...)

• "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" (1859), translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  7 March 2018 by Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald

  In early 1859 the English erudite Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), a retired Cambridge graduate with independent means, published anonymously his translation of selected stanzas of the 12-Century Persian poem “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam, who ”was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half (...)

• "Tintern Abbey" (1798) by William Wordsworth - the original and most authentic text

  20 November 2013 by William Wordsworth

  This poem is arguably the greatest lyrical poem in the English language.
  It was first published in 1798 in what is probably the most famous book of poetry in the language: Lyrical Ballads, which, in addition to ground-breaking works by Wordsworth exploring the speech and the social situation (...)

• Thoughts on reading "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  20 February 2006 by Ray

  One is first and foremost captivated by the sheer lyrical beauty of the poem, from the first of the seventy-five quatrains (or rubaiyats):
  - 1 - Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s (...)

• An Anthology of the Greatest English Poems

  31 January 2006 by Ray

  Although the criteria for inclusion in this anthology are personal, they are nevertheless quite straightforward: the poems have to approach that superior and very rare level of excellence and poetic power epitomized for me by Wordsworth’s sublime Tintern Abbey, by Coleridge’s epic The Rime of the (...)