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The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.
Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."
With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His many books of poetry include Opened Ground, Electric Light, The Spirit Level, Seeing Things, Station Island, The Haw Lantern, and Field Work, as well as translations of Beowulf and Diary of One Who Vanished. A resident of Dublin, he has taught poetry at Oxford University and Harvard University. In 2004, Heaney was presented with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
The British poet, translator, author, and critic Ted Hughes, born in 1930, wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Racine's Phèdre, and Euripedes' Alcestis; and the bestselling Birthday Letters. Hughes served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II from 1984 until his death in 1998.
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.
Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them—each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."
With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, diverse, and inspiring collection of poetry.
Quotes
"The method employed in arranging and presenting [the contents of this book] must surely be the one for all the best anthologies . . . The Rattle Bag sets a standard which other anthologies will find it difficult to equal."—Alan Brownjohn, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"A splendid, huge, resonant book."—The Observer (London)
"A must for anyone at all who likes poetry."—Melvyn Bragg, The Times (London)
Table of Contents
A-M
"'Adieu, farewell earth's bliss,'" Thomas Nashe
"After his Death," Norman MacCaig
n0 "After Looking into a Book Belonging to My Great-Grandfather . . .," Hyam Plutzik
"Afterwards," Thomas Hardy
"Ah! Sunflower," William Blake
"Alfred Corning Clark," Robert Lowell
"The Allansford Pursuit," Robert Graves
"'All the world's a stage,'" William Shakespeare
"Among the Narcissi," Sylvia Plath
"The Ancients of the World," R. S. Thomas
"'And death shall have no dominion,'" Dylan Thomas
"And in the 51st Year of that Century . . . ," Hyam Plutzik
"'And the days are not full enough,'" Ezra Pound
"Angelica the Doorkeeper," Anon
"'The Angel that presided o'er my birth,'" William Blake
"'Anger lay by me all night long,'" Elizabeth Daryush
"An Animal Alphabet," Edward Lear
"Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries," Hugh MacDiarmid
"'anyone lived in a pretty how town,'" e. e. cummings
"Apple Blossom," Louis MacNeice
"The Artist," William Carlos Williams
"'As I came in by Fiddich-side,'" Anon
"'As I walked out one evening,'" W. H. Auden
"'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,'" Gerard Manley Hopkins
"As Much as You Can," C. P. Cavafy
"'As the team's head-brass flashed out,'" Edward Thomas
"'As you came from the holy land,'" Sir Walter Ralegh
"At Grass," Philip Larkin
"At the Bomb Testing Site," William Stafford
"'At the grey round of the hill,'" W. B. Yeats
"Auguries of Innocence," William Blake
"Aunt Julia," Norman MacCaig
"Autobahnmotorwayautoroute," Adrian Mitchell
"Autobiography," Louis MacNeice
"Autowreck," Karl Shapiro
"'Aye, but to die, and go we know not where,'" William Shakespeare
"Baby Song," Thom Gunn
"The Badger," John Clare
"Bagpipe Music," Louis MacNeice
"Bags of Meat," Thomas Hardy
"The Ballad of Rudolph Reed," Gwendolyn Brooks
"Ballad of the Bread Man," Charles Causley
"Be Merry," Anon
"Beeny Cliff," Thomas Hardy
"'Before I knocked and flesh let enter,'" Dylan Thomas
"Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden," Keith Douglas
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci," John Keats
"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," John Crowe Ransom
"'Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,'" William Shakespeare
"Bermudas," Andrew Marvell
"Bethsabe's Song," George Peele
"Bifocal," William Stafford
"The Bight," Elizabeth Bishop
"Binsey Poplars," Cerard Manley Hopkins
"Birches," Robert Frost
"Birth of the Foal," Ferenc Juhász
"The Black Cloud," W. H. Davies
"Black Rock of Kiltearn," Andrew Young
"The Blacksmiths," Anon
"Blue Girls," John Crowe Ransom
"Boat Stealing," William Wordsworth
"Bog-Face," Stevie Smith
"'Break, break, break,'" Alfred Lord Tennyson
"Breathing Space July," Tomas Transtromer
"Brian O'Linn," Anon
"'Buffalo Bill's,'" e. e. cummings
"The Buffalo Skinners," Anon
"Bullfight," Miroslav Holub
"The Burglar of Babylon," Elizabeth Bishop
"The Burning Babe," Robert Southwell
"The Cable Ship," Harry Edmund Martinson
"'Call for the Robin Redbreast and the Wren,'" John Webster
"The Cap and Bells," W. B. Yeats
"Carentan O Carentan," Louis Simpson
"'Carry her over the water,'" W. H. Auden
"Channel Firing," Thomas Hardy
"A Charm," Anon
"The Child Dying," Edwin Muir
"A Child's Pet," W. H. Davies
"Child's Song," Robert Lowell
"The Chimney Sweeper," William Blake
"The Clod and the Pebble," William Blake
"Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue," Anon
"Cock-Crow," Edward Thomas
"The Cold Heaven," W. B. Yeats
"The Collarbone of a Hare," W. B. Yeats
"The Comb...
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Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.
Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it is a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right....
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Shakespeare's best as chosen by the great English poet“According to most anthologies, [Shakespeare] wrote only sonnets and songs for his plays. The reason for this [is the] reluctance of anthologists to break into the sacred precincts of his drama and start looting portable chunks . . . Yet when he great speeches of his plays are taken out of context they are no more difficult to understand and appropriate than those by other great poets.”
This clear, compact, inviting selection of Shakespeare’s verse opens the door to new readers of our greatest writer and deepens lifelong readers’ understanding of his work. Ted Hughes spent his life considering Shakespeare’s works and drawing on them for his own poetry; his book-length account of Shakespeare’s development, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, was one of the most distinctive works of literary criticism of recent years.
For this selection, Hughes deliberately took strong, relatively self-contained passages of Shakespeare’s verse out of the plays and arranged them in a pattern, like beads on a string, including the best-known songs and sonnets. The result is at once a revealing sequence of Shakespeare’s verse and an anthology of his greatest bits—“read in less than a minute, learned in less than five,” Hughes remarks in the introduction, and always “capable of striking up a life of their own in the general experience of the reader.” ...
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This collection brings together the more than 250 children’s poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his career. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those published for younger readers and progressing to more complex and sophisticated poems that he felt were written “within hearing” of children. Throughout, Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child’s insatiable wonderment and sense of humor as well as his own instinctive and illuminating perspective on people and other creatures of the natural world.
With drawings that capture the wit, range, and richness of these poems, acclaimed illustrator Raymond Briggs helps make this a book any reader can return to again and again for amusement, inspiration, and reassurance. ...
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From Ted Hughes, England's Poet Laureate, Knopf is proud to present a children's classic which has been unavailable in the U.S. for many years. First published in 1968, The Iron Giant is a modern fantasy about a massive giant who stalks the earth devouring metal, terrifying farmers and townspeople everywhere. Despite his insatiable hunger, the Iron Giant is quite gentle and good-natured, though the townspeople are too frightened of him to realize it. So they capture him and put him in a scrapyard, where he happily stuffs himself with stoves and bicycles. The people forget about the Iron Giant until a space-bat the size of Australia hovers over the earth, poised to destroy it. Earth needs a hero and only the Iron Giant is big enough and brave enough to do battle with the hideous creature from outer space. With a tractor-eating giant, a menacing space-bat, and a young boy-hero, The Iron Giant is an accessible, early chapter book with plenty of appeal for reluctant readers and budding science fiction and fantasy fans....
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In the last year of his life, Ted Hughes completed translations of three major dramatic works: Racine's Phedre, Euripedes' Alcestis, and the trilogy of plays known as at The Oresteia, a family story of astonishing power and the background or inspiration for much subsequent drama, fiction, and poetry.
The Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephori, and the Eumenides--tell the story of the house of Atreus: After King Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son, Orestes, is commanded by Apollo to avenge the crime by killing his mother, and he returns from exile to do so, bringing on himself the wrath of the Furies and the judgment of the court of Athens.
Hughes's "acting version" of the trilogy is faithful to its nature as a dramatic work, and his translation is itself a great performance; while artfully inflected with the contemporary, it has a classical beauty and authority. Hughes's Oresteia is quickly becoming the standard edition for English-language readers and for the stage, too.
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Bert’s little sister knows that he loves to bring home pets and hide them in his room, and her curiosity about what is going on in there has been building and building. Finally she simply cannot wait any longer to check it out for herself. Inside, she discovers a zoo-worthy collection of animals tucked into every nook and cranny. But after she gets them out and about, can she undo the chaos and put everyone back in their proper places before Bert comes home? Playful illustrations by Tracey Campbell Pearson offer a bright and funny new interpretation of Ted Hughes’s classic poem. ...
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