Along with writing comedic and dramatic plays, William Shakespeare was also a master poet. Using the sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), he composed 154 poems covering timeless themes of love, beauty, and mortality. The poems' subjects-the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet-have become nearly as famous as the sonnets themselves. While not the first to write poems in sonnet form, Shakespeare's...

Three American friends fight back against the terrorism while on board a train from Amsterdam to Paris.

"There are no poetic 'subjects' in this book, no conventional nightingales and daffodils, and there is no acceptance, either, of the traditional rules of meter and rhyme. As one discerning critic has said: 'We have here, in short, poetry that expresses freely a modern sensibility, the ways of feeling and the modes of experience of one fully alive in his own age'. "The main poem in this collection is 'The Waste Land' (1922) to which Mr. Eliot has...

This masterpiece of eighteenth-century English poetry tells the epic tale of a sailor who endures a fate worse than death for killing an albatross. After callously shooting an albatross with his crossbow, a sailor is doomed to a nightmarish voyage from the Antarctic to the Equator before returning home as the sole survivor of the journey. When the haunting figure Life-in-Death wins his soul in a game of dice, the sailor is doomed to forever roam the...

"Inferno" by Dante Alighieri is an epic allegory of the spiritual journey of man. Virgil, Dante the pilgrim's guide, leads him through the 7 layers of hell. Throughout his journey through the torturous layers, Dante discovers the perfection of God's divine justice and themes of contrapasso are largely explored. Classical symbolism and classical figures are constantly referenced. This serves to emphasize that God's power rules over all - even pagan...

Presents all of the English poet's verse, including his sonnets and odes, the allegorical romance "Endymion," and the five-act poetic tragedy "Otho the Great."

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.