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Books and Libraries

Poems

Part of Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series

Author Andrew Scrimgeour
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Hardcover
$18.00 US
Knopf | Everyman's Library
On sale Nov 02, 2021 | 272 Pages | 978-0-593-32019-8
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  • English > Creative Writing > Poetry
  • English > Literature > Introduction to Poetry
  • English > Literature > World Poetry
  • About
  • Table of Contents
  • Excerpt
  • Author
Here is an enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the world.

Books have long captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Emily Dickinson envisions these precious objects as “Frigates” that “take us Lands away”; Alberto Rios calls them “the deli offerings of civilization itself.” This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear “a choir of authors murmuring inside their books,” as Billy Collins has it. 

The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such pillars of world literature as Catullus, Horace, T’ao Ch’ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth; more recent luminaries include Jorge Luis Borges, C. P. Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Wallace Stevens, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott.
The Love of Books
Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm”
Dylan Thomas, from “Notes on the Art of Poetry”
Theodore Beza, “Hayle to My Bookes”
Robert William Service, “Book Lover”
William Wordsworth, “Wings Have We”
Emily Dickinson, “There is No Frigate Like a Book”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet XXIII”
George Crabbe, from “The Library”
Tsitsi Jaji, “Unaccompanied Minor”
Maya Angelou, “I Love the Look of Words”
Latin Proverb, “Words Fly Away”
Tessa Ransford, “In Convents and Crypts”
Henry Vaughan, “To His Books”
John Donne, “A Valediction of the Book”
Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Book, II)”
Lynn Powell, “Sword Drill”
Tony Harrison, “Book Ends”
 
All Sorts of Readers
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “There Are Only Four Kinds of Readers”
Louis MacNeice, “The British Museum Reading Room”
Stephen Kuusisto, “Night Seasons”
Coventry Patmore “The Revelation”
Hilaire René Belloc, “On His Books”
Anonymous, “A Description of a College Room”
Pierre de Ronsard, “To His Valet”
T’ao Ch’ien, “Reading the Book of Hills and Seas”
Muddupalani, “How to Read a Book”
Paul Valéry, “The Angel Handed Me a Book”
Czeslaw Milosz, “Father in the Library”
 
Turning the Page
Billy Collins, “Books”
David S. Herrstrom, “Sacred Books”
Stephen Dunn, “The Book and I”
Charles Bukowski, “They Arrived in Time”
Dante, from Inferno
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Supernatural Love”
John Burnside, “September Evening: Deer at Big Basin”
Yi Sha, “Sunday”
Flavio Santi, “Dear Mary”
Juan Manuel Roca, “The Library of the Blind”
Mona Van Duyn, “In Bed with a Book”
Iku Takenaka, “My Books
Mel Pryor, “In a Secondhand Bookshop”
Agi Mishol, “Poetry Reading”
C.P. Cavafy, “Very Rarely”
Derek Walcott, “This Page is a Cloud”
Jean Sprackland, “The Girl Who Ate Books”
John Glenday, “For My Wife, Reading in Bed”
 
Discovering Reading
Joyce Sutphen, “Things You Didn’t Put on Your Résumé”
Julia Alvarez, “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library
Laurie L. Patton, “On Learning a Sacred Language in Childhood”
Lewis Carroll, “What is the Use of a Book?”
Patricia Hooper, “The World Book
Margarita Engle, “Tula [“Books are door-shaped”]”
 
Celebrating Individual Books and Authors
Andrew Marvell, “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’”
John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
W. H. Auden, “Auden on Montaigne”
Ivor Gurney, “George Chapman – The Illiad”
R. S. Thomas, “Henry James”
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Acquiring an Encyclopedia”
Ezra Pound, “Cantico del Sole”
Andrew D. Scrimgeour, “Winter Pages”
Siegfried Sassoon, “To an Eighteenth Century Poet”
Joseph Brodsky, from “Elegy for John Donne”
Giovanni Boccaccio, “Boccaccio Sends Petrarch a Copy of Dante”
Anne Stevenson, “Re-reading Jane”
Wendy Cope, “My Father’s Shakespeare”
 
Because of Libraries
Alberto Rios, “Don’t Go into the Library”
J. K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
William E. Gladstone, “Books Are a Delightful Society”
Liz Lochhead, “Random”
Yuriy Andrukhovych, “Library”
Kostas Koutsourelis, “Library”
Laurynas Katkus, “On the Sixth Floor”
Jill Osier, “Elegy”
Robert L. Chapman, “Library”
Rosemary Griebel, “Library”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things"
Alasdair Paterson, “On the Library”
William Cowper, from “An Ode Addressed”
Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries”
Frederick Buechner, “Holy a Place”
Gerald Stern, “Stepping Out of Poetry”
Lesbia Harford, “Closing Time: Public Library”
Abraham Cowley, “Mr. Cowley’s Book Presenting It Selfe”
Margaret Cavendish, “Fame’s Library within the Temple”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Library”
Gillian Clarke, “In a Cardiff Arcade”
U. A. Fanthorpe, “In the English Faculty Library, Oxford”
James Russell Lowell, “Literature for Desolate Islands”
Ian McMillan, “Adult Fiction”
 
Always the Librarians
Joseph Mills, “If Librarians Were Honest”
Andy Jackson, “Enquiry Desk”
Rita Dove, “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967”
William Mcllvanney, “In the Library”
Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long”
Sean O’Brien, “The Beautiful Librarians”
John Holland, “On the Death of Esther Caterer”
Philip Metres, “Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker’s Stroke”
 
The Writing of Books
Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing”
Durs Grünbein, “On Learning Old Vocabulary”
Amit Majmudar, “Vocative”
Alicia Ostriker, from Ars Poetica
Gabriela Mistral, “The Teller of Tales”
Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense”
Philippe Jaccottet, from “Songs from Below”
Ilya Kaminksky, “Author’s Prayer”
William Blake, from Songs of Innocence
Les Murray, “The Privacy of Typewriters”
Li Sen, “Confronting Nujiang”
William Stafford, “A Writer’s Fountain Pen Talking”
Odia Ofeimun, “I Am a Writer,”
Petrarch, from Canzoniere 1, “O You Who Hear”
Gaius Valerius Catullus, “To Whom Shall I Offer this Book?”
William Butler Yeats, “Where My Words Go”
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”
Marcus Valerius Martialis, “Epigrams 1,3, “My Little Book”
Horace, Ode 3.30, “More Lasting than Bronze”
Guido Cavalcanti, “Sonnet XVIII”
Uejima Onitsura, Untitled haiku
Johann W. Goethe, “Authors”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet and His Songs”
Callimachus, “The Very First Time”
 
Marginalia
John F. M. Doraston, “The Bookworm”
Robert Burns, “The Book-Worms”
Evenus, “Page-eater”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh
Ben Jonson, “To My Book-seller”
Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Bookmarks”
Tarannum Riyaz, “The Scent of Old Books”
Robert Herrick, “Make Haste Away”
Udava R. Tennakoon, “Books Up on Books”
Decimus Ausonius, “You’ve Bought Books”
Eugene Field, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”
Andrew Lang, “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise”
Adilia Lopes, “I Don’t Like Books”
Lope de Vega, “So Many Books”
Ecclesiastes 12:11-12, “The Sayings of the Wise”
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”
 
Rethinking Books and Libraries
Frank Osen, “Bookshop Shopping”
Douglas Dunn, “December’s Door”
Joe Lucia, “The Afterlife of Libraries”
Bertolt Brecht, “The Book Burnings”
Michael Symmons Roberts, “The Future of Books”
Elaine Equi, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn”
 
Index of Authors
FOREWORD

Ever since Johannes Gutenberg transformed the printing of books, making them available to a wider public, books have captured the imaginations of readers everywhere, inspiring love, and even veneration. Indeed, books may be unrivaled in evoking such bonedeep affection. William Wordsworth said that these page-packed parcels have wings to take us ‘as far as we can go’, to ‘wilderness and wood, / Blank ocean and mere sky’. For Alberto Ríos, they are ‘the deli offerings of civilization itself ’. When you enter a room full of books, even if you don’t take one off the shelf, William Gladstone observed, ‘they seem to speak to you, to welcome you’.
 
They also ask to be handled. As Rosemary Griebel put it, books wait ‘like abandoned dogs / for the warmth of hands on their spines’. Books are meant to be caressed, page by page, with a gentle downward motion, sometimes with a touch of moisture from the forefinger, as the reader leans attentively over them.
 
Books awaken all the senses, and many people name the sweet, musty autumn scent in libraries and used bookstores as among their favorites, along with freshly cut grass and bread baking in the oven. Robert Chapman evokes that olfactory delight: ‘Amidst the sweets and / Dust of the stacks / I edge from book to book like a grimy kid, / Flattening his nose against an infi nitude / Of candy store and bake shop fronts.’
 
So we line our walls with them, spend the milk money on them, read them aloud, converse with them, argue with them, annotate them, learn from them, raid them, edit them, translate them, write more of them, and fail to winnow them – reaping the displeasure of our spouses and partners who threaten to turn us out of our book-crammed homes.
 
Our adulation of books naturally extends to the consummate book place – the library. We remember and honor the awe-inspiring reading rooms with their stained glass, inexhaustible holdings, and sequestered places in the stacks where, with Billy Collins, one might hear ‘a choir of authors murmuring inside their books / along the unlit, alphabetical shelves’.
 
Over the years as a dean of libraries, I loved being alone in the library at night after hours, especially in winter as snow fell. The library in its warm calm had the feel of a snug subterranean greenhouse – a place where texts slumbered like seeds in their stiff jackets, awaiting human hands to crack open their husks and bring to flower the tales of novelists, the arguments of philosophers, and the diggings of historians.
 
Not only are libraries the memory banks of civilization, they are symbolic sanctuaries of the freedom of a people to speak its mind. In the stacks a cacophony of voices is heard on every side of an issue, voices from the past and the present, from the center of the dominant culture and from the margins. The iconic figures of the past are routinely studied, interrogated, decried, demoted deconstructed, and revered – but never silenced or discarded. Minor ones and neglected ones are constantly discovered and rediscovered and promoted to principal interlocutors in scholarly discourse. Even the most hostile voices are accorded the same protected space. ‘If librarians were honest,’ writes Joseph Mills, ‘They would post danger / signs warning that contact / might result in mood swings, / severe changes in vision, / and mind-altering effects’.
 
Joining the tributes to libraries are those that honor librarians – the ones who welcomed the poets in their formative years into the world of books; who, as Nikki Giovanni says, first ‘opened that wardrobe / But no lions or witches scared me’; dependable guides who over the years encouraged them to go deeper into the stacks and take an armload of adventure home, when it might be enjoyed deep into the night under the covers with a flashlight.
 
The poets gathered here range from the author of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE to canonical writers of British, American, and Spanish literature such as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda. Strongly represented are contemporary poets writing in countries across many time zones. Some are well known  throughout the world, others enjoy regional status, and a few are published here for the first time. The love of books and libraries knows no linguistic boundaries, so a third of these poems have been rendered in translation. Interestingly, a number of the poets included have themselves been librarians, J. W. von Goethe, Coventry Patmore, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Larkin and Rosemary Griebel amongst them.
 
I should like to dedicate this volume to Katherine W. McCain, Virginia Ramsey Mollenkott, Kent Harold Richards, Howard D. White and Louis Charles Willard, for debts untold.
 
Finally, as you embark on an excursion through these pages, a toast:
 
May the bookshelves on your walls be full
May the book stacks on your desk
and by your chair or bed be high
And may the doors of your library
remain open – always.
 
Godspeed
Andrew D. Scrimgeour
Copyright © 2021 by Edited by Andrew Scrimgeour. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
ANDREW SCRIMGEOUR is Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He is Archivist Emeritus of the Society of Biblical Literature and the founding archivist of the American Academy of Religion. His essays and short stories have been published in The New York Times. View titles by Andrew Scrimgeour

About

Here is an enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology that testifies to the passion books and libraries have inspired through the ages and around the world.

Books have long captured the love, imagination, even the veneration, of readers everywhere. Emily Dickinson envisions these precious objects as “Frigates” that “take us Lands away”; Alberto Rios calls them “the deli offerings of civilization itself.” This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: the libraries and bookshops where one can best hear “a choir of authors murmuring inside their books,” as Billy Collins has it. 

The poets collected here range from the writer of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE through such pillars of world literature as Catullus, Horace, T’ao Ch’ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth; more recent luminaries include Jorge Luis Borges, C. P. Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Wallace Stevens, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Derek Walcott.

Table of Contents

The Love of Books
Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm”
Dylan Thomas, from “Notes on the Art of Poetry”
Theodore Beza, “Hayle to My Bookes”
Robert William Service, “Book Lover”
William Wordsworth, “Wings Have We”
Emily Dickinson, “There is No Frigate Like a Book”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet XXIII”
George Crabbe, from “The Library”
Tsitsi Jaji, “Unaccompanied Minor”
Maya Angelou, “I Love the Look of Words”
Latin Proverb, “Words Fly Away”
Tessa Ransford, “In Convents and Crypts”
Henry Vaughan, “To His Books”
John Donne, “A Valediction of the Book”
Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Book, II)”
Lynn Powell, “Sword Drill”
Tony Harrison, “Book Ends”
 
All Sorts of Readers
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “There Are Only Four Kinds of Readers”
Louis MacNeice, “The British Museum Reading Room”
Stephen Kuusisto, “Night Seasons”
Coventry Patmore “The Revelation”
Hilaire René Belloc, “On His Books”
Anonymous, “A Description of a College Room”
Pierre de Ronsard, “To His Valet”
T’ao Ch’ien, “Reading the Book of Hills and Seas”
Muddupalani, “How to Read a Book”
Paul Valéry, “The Angel Handed Me a Book”
Czeslaw Milosz, “Father in the Library”
 
Turning the Page
Billy Collins, “Books”
David S. Herrstrom, “Sacred Books”
Stephen Dunn, “The Book and I”
Charles Bukowski, “They Arrived in Time”
Dante, from Inferno
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Supernatural Love”
John Burnside, “September Evening: Deer at Big Basin”
Yi Sha, “Sunday”
Flavio Santi, “Dear Mary”
Juan Manuel Roca, “The Library of the Blind”
Mona Van Duyn, “In Bed with a Book”
Iku Takenaka, “My Books
Mel Pryor, “In a Secondhand Bookshop”
Agi Mishol, “Poetry Reading”
C.P. Cavafy, “Very Rarely”
Derek Walcott, “This Page is a Cloud”
Jean Sprackland, “The Girl Who Ate Books”
John Glenday, “For My Wife, Reading in Bed”
 
Discovering Reading
Joyce Sutphen, “Things You Didn’t Put on Your Résumé”
Julia Alvarez, “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library
Laurie L. Patton, “On Learning a Sacred Language in Childhood”
Lewis Carroll, “What is the Use of a Book?”
Patricia Hooper, “The World Book
Margarita Engle, “Tula [“Books are door-shaped”]”
 
Celebrating Individual Books and Authors
Andrew Marvell, “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’”
John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
W. H. Auden, “Auden on Montaigne”
Ivor Gurney, “George Chapman – The Illiad”
R. S. Thomas, “Henry James”
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Acquiring an Encyclopedia”
Ezra Pound, “Cantico del Sole”
Andrew D. Scrimgeour, “Winter Pages”
Siegfried Sassoon, “To an Eighteenth Century Poet”
Joseph Brodsky, from “Elegy for John Donne”
Giovanni Boccaccio, “Boccaccio Sends Petrarch a Copy of Dante”
Anne Stevenson, “Re-reading Jane”
Wendy Cope, “My Father’s Shakespeare”
 
Because of Libraries
Alberto Rios, “Don’t Go into the Library”
J. K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
William E. Gladstone, “Books Are a Delightful Society”
Liz Lochhead, “Random”
Yuriy Andrukhovych, “Library”
Kostas Koutsourelis, “Library”
Laurynas Katkus, “On the Sixth Floor”
Jill Osier, “Elegy”
Robert L. Chapman, “Library”
Rosemary Griebel, “Library”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things"
Alasdair Paterson, “On the Library”
William Cowper, from “An Ode Addressed”
Walt Whitman, “Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries”
Frederick Buechner, “Holy a Place”
Gerald Stern, “Stepping Out of Poetry”
Lesbia Harford, “Closing Time: Public Library”
Abraham Cowley, “Mr. Cowley’s Book Presenting It Selfe”
Margaret Cavendish, “Fame’s Library within the Temple”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Library”
Gillian Clarke, “In a Cardiff Arcade”
U. A. Fanthorpe, “In the English Faculty Library, Oxford”
James Russell Lowell, “Literature for Desolate Islands”
Ian McMillan, “Adult Fiction”
 
Always the Librarians
Joseph Mills, “If Librarians Were Honest”
Andy Jackson, “Enquiry Desk”
Rita Dove, “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967”
William Mcllvanney, “In the Library”
Nikki Giovanni, “A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long”
Sean O’Brien, “The Beautiful Librarians”
John Holland, “On the Death of Esther Caterer”
Philip Metres, “Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker’s Stroke”
 
The Writing of Books
Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing”
Durs Grünbein, “On Learning Old Vocabulary”
Amit Majmudar, “Vocative”
Alicia Ostriker, from Ars Poetica
Gabriela Mistral, “The Teller of Tales”
Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense”
Philippe Jaccottet, from “Songs from Below”
Ilya Kaminksky, “Author’s Prayer”
William Blake, from Songs of Innocence
Les Murray, “The Privacy of Typewriters”
Li Sen, “Confronting Nujiang”
William Stafford, “A Writer’s Fountain Pen Talking”
Odia Ofeimun, “I Am a Writer,”
Petrarch, from Canzoniere 1, “O You Who Hear”
Gaius Valerius Catullus, “To Whom Shall I Offer this Book?”
William Butler Yeats, “Where My Words Go”
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book”
Marcus Valerius Martialis, “Epigrams 1,3, “My Little Book”
Horace, Ode 3.30, “More Lasting than Bronze”
Guido Cavalcanti, “Sonnet XVIII”
Uejima Onitsura, Untitled haiku
Johann W. Goethe, “Authors”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Poet and His Songs”
Callimachus, “The Very First Time”
 
Marginalia
John F. M. Doraston, “The Bookworm”
Robert Burns, “The Book-Worms”
Evenus, “Page-eater”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh
Ben Jonson, “To My Book-seller”
Thomas Hornsby Ferril, “Bookmarks”
Tarannum Riyaz, “The Scent of Old Books”
Robert Herrick, “Make Haste Away”
Udava R. Tennakoon, “Books Up on Books”
Decimus Ausonius, “You’ve Bought Books”
Eugene Field, “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”
Andrew Lang, “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise”
Adilia Lopes, “I Don’t Like Books”
Lope de Vega, “So Many Books”
Ecclesiastes 12:11-12, “The Sayings of the Wise”
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”
 
Rethinking Books and Libraries
Frank Osen, “Bookshop Shopping”
Douglas Dunn, “December’s Door”
Joe Lucia, “The Afterlife of Libraries”
Bertolt Brecht, “The Book Burnings”
Michael Symmons Roberts, “The Future of Books”
Elaine Equi, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn”
 
Index of Authors

Excerpt

FOREWORD

Ever since Johannes Gutenberg transformed the printing of books, making them available to a wider public, books have captured the imaginations of readers everywhere, inspiring love, and even veneration. Indeed, books may be unrivaled in evoking such bonedeep affection. William Wordsworth said that these page-packed parcels have wings to take us ‘as far as we can go’, to ‘wilderness and wood, / Blank ocean and mere sky’. For Alberto Ríos, they are ‘the deli offerings of civilization itself ’. When you enter a room full of books, even if you don’t take one off the shelf, William Gladstone observed, ‘they seem to speak to you, to welcome you’.
 
They also ask to be handled. As Rosemary Griebel put it, books wait ‘like abandoned dogs / for the warmth of hands on their spines’. Books are meant to be caressed, page by page, with a gentle downward motion, sometimes with a touch of moisture from the forefinger, as the reader leans attentively over them.
 
Books awaken all the senses, and many people name the sweet, musty autumn scent in libraries and used bookstores as among their favorites, along with freshly cut grass and bread baking in the oven. Robert Chapman evokes that olfactory delight: ‘Amidst the sweets and / Dust of the stacks / I edge from book to book like a grimy kid, / Flattening his nose against an infi nitude / Of candy store and bake shop fronts.’
 
So we line our walls with them, spend the milk money on them, read them aloud, converse with them, argue with them, annotate them, learn from them, raid them, edit them, translate them, write more of them, and fail to winnow them – reaping the displeasure of our spouses and partners who threaten to turn us out of our book-crammed homes.
 
Our adulation of books naturally extends to the consummate book place – the library. We remember and honor the awe-inspiring reading rooms with their stained glass, inexhaustible holdings, and sequestered places in the stacks where, with Billy Collins, one might hear ‘a choir of authors murmuring inside their books / along the unlit, alphabetical shelves’.
 
Over the years as a dean of libraries, I loved being alone in the library at night after hours, especially in winter as snow fell. The library in its warm calm had the feel of a snug subterranean greenhouse – a place where texts slumbered like seeds in their stiff jackets, awaiting human hands to crack open their husks and bring to flower the tales of novelists, the arguments of philosophers, and the diggings of historians.
 
Not only are libraries the memory banks of civilization, they are symbolic sanctuaries of the freedom of a people to speak its mind. In the stacks a cacophony of voices is heard on every side of an issue, voices from the past and the present, from the center of the dominant culture and from the margins. The iconic figures of the past are routinely studied, interrogated, decried, demoted deconstructed, and revered – but never silenced or discarded. Minor ones and neglected ones are constantly discovered and rediscovered and promoted to principal interlocutors in scholarly discourse. Even the most hostile voices are accorded the same protected space. ‘If librarians were honest,’ writes Joseph Mills, ‘They would post danger / signs warning that contact / might result in mood swings, / severe changes in vision, / and mind-altering effects’.
 
Joining the tributes to libraries are those that honor librarians – the ones who welcomed the poets in their formative years into the world of books; who, as Nikki Giovanni says, first ‘opened that wardrobe / But no lions or witches scared me’; dependable guides who over the years encouraged them to go deeper into the stacks and take an armload of adventure home, when it might be enjoyed deep into the night under the covers with a flashlight.
 
The poets gathered here range from the author of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE to canonical writers of British, American, and Spanish literature such as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda. Strongly represented are contemporary poets writing in countries across many time zones. Some are well known  throughout the world, others enjoy regional status, and a few are published here for the first time. The love of books and libraries knows no linguistic boundaries, so a third of these poems have been rendered in translation. Interestingly, a number of the poets included have themselves been librarians, J. W. von Goethe, Coventry Patmore, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Larkin and Rosemary Griebel amongst them.
 
I should like to dedicate this volume to Katherine W. McCain, Virginia Ramsey Mollenkott, Kent Harold Richards, Howard D. White and Louis Charles Willard, for debts untold.
 
Finally, as you embark on an excursion through these pages, a toast:
 
May the bookshelves on your walls be full
May the book stacks on your desk
and by your chair or bed be high
And may the doors of your library
remain open – always.
 
Godspeed
Andrew D. Scrimgeour
Copyright © 2021 by Edited by Andrew Scrimgeour. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

ANDREW SCRIMGEOUR is Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He is Archivist Emeritus of the Society of Biblical Literature and the founding archivist of the American Academy of Religion. His essays and short stories have been published in The New York Times. View titles by Andrew Scrimgeour

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    Uyghur Poems
    Aziz Isa Elkun
    978-1-101-90834-1
    $20.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 12, 2023
  • English Romantic Poets
    English Romantic Poets
    978-0-593-53552-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 04, 2022
  • River Poems
    River Poems
    978-0-593-53553-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 04, 2022
  • No Place Like Home
    No Place Like Home
    Poems
    978-0-593-32129-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 01, 2022
  • Poems of London
    Poems of London
    978-0-593-32020-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 05, 2021
  • Buzz Words
    Buzz Words
    Poems About Insects
    978-1-101-90826-6
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 06, 2021
  • Poems of Healing
    Poems of Healing
    978-1-101-90825-9
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 30, 2021
  • Poems from Greek Antiquity
    Poems from Greek Antiquity
    978-1-101-90821-1
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 10, 2020
  • Border Lines
    Border Lines
    Poems of Migration
    978-1-101-90824-2
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 08, 2020
  • Montale: Poems
    Montale: Poems
    Edited by Jonathan Galassi
    Eugenio Montale
    978-1-101-90822-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 07, 2020
  • Sondheim: Lyrics
    Sondheim: Lyrics
    Edited by Peter Gethers with Russell Perreault
    Stephen Sondheim
    978-1-101-90816-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Poems About Trees
    Poems About Trees
    978-1-101-90815-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 01, 2019
  • Rumi
    Rumi
    Unseen Poems; Edited and Translated by Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz
    Rumi
    978-1-101-90810-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 10, 2019
  • Poems of Paris
    Poems of Paris
    978-1-101-90812-9
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 12, 2019
  • Reel Verse
    Reel Verse
    Poems About the Movies
    978-1-101-90803-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 22, 2019
  • Hip Hops
    Hip Hops
    Poems About Beer
    978-1-101-90791-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Pope: Poems
    Pope: Poems
    Edited by Claude Rawson
    Alexander Pope
    978-1-101-90802-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 14, 2018
  • Poems of Rome
    Poems of Rome
    978-1-101-90801-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 03, 2018
  • The Language of Flowers
    The Language of Flowers
    Poems
    978-1-101-90795-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Poems of Gratitude
    Poems of Gratitude
    978-1-101-90790-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 12, 2017
  • French Poetry
    French Poetry
    From Medieval to Modern Times
    978-1-101-90783-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2017
  • Merrill: Poems
    Merrill: Poems
    Edited by Langdon Hammer
    James Merrill
    978-1-101-90785-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 07, 2017
  • Poems About Sculpture
    Poems About Sculpture
    978-1-101-90775-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 06, 2016
  • The Echoing Green
    The Echoing Green
    Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses
    978-1-101-90773-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 15, 2016
  • Horace
    Horace
    Poems; Edited by Paul Quarrie
    Horace
    978-1-101-90767-2
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Monster Verse
    Monster Verse
    Poems Human and Inhuman
    978-0-375-71240-1
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 15, 2015
  • Measure for Measure
    Measure for Measure
    An Anthology of Poetic Meters
    978-0-375-71248-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2015
  • Poems Dead and Undead
    Poems Dead and Undead
    978-0-375-71251-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 16, 2014
  • Arabic Poems
    Arabic Poems
    978-0-375-71243-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 05, 2014
  • Poems of the American South
    Poems of the American South
    978-0-375-71244-9
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 05, 2014
  • Marvell: Poems
    Marvell: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Andrew Marvell
    978-0-8041-5296-9
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 02, 2014
  • Cavafy: Poems
    Cavafy: Poems
    Edited and Translated with notes by Daniel Mendelsohn
    C.P. Cavafy
    978-0-375-71242-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Joyce: Poems and a Play
    Joyce: Poems and a Play
    James Joyce
    978-0-375-71233-3
    $13.50 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 25, 2014
  • April Twilights and Other Poems
    April Twilights and Other Poems
    Foreword by Robert Thacker
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-96146-4
    $20.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 26, 2013
  • Art and Artists
    Art and Artists
    Poems
    978-0-307-95938-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 10, 2012
  • Villanelles
    Villanelles
    978-0-307-95786-3
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 06, 2012
  • The Best of Archy and Mehitabel
    The Best of Archy and Mehitabel
    Introduction by E. B. White
    Don Marquis
    978-0-307-70092-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 25, 2011
  • Killer Verse
    Killer Verse
    Poems of Murder and Mayhem
    978-0-307-70093-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 06, 2011
  • Emily Dickinson: Letters
    Emily Dickinson: Letters
    Edited by Emily Fragos
    Emily Dickinson
    978-0-307-59704-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 19, 2011
  • Poems and Songs: Cohen
    Poems and Songs: Cohen
    Leonard Cohen
    978-0-307-59583-6
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2011
  • The Art of Angling
    The Art of Angling
    Poems about Fishing
    978-0-307-59703-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2011
  • Irish Poems
    Irish Poems
    978-0-307-59498-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 01, 2011
  • Millay: Poems
    Millay: Poems
    Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
    Edna St. Vincent Millay
    978-0-307-59266-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 02, 2010
  • Russian Poets
    Russian Poets
    978-0-307-26974-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 12, 2009
  • Poems About Horses
    Poems About Horses
    978-0-307-26925-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 28, 2009
  • Three Hundred Tang Poems
    Three Hundred Tang Poems
    978-0-307-26973-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2009
  • Music's Spell
    Music's Spell
    Poems About Music and Musicians
    978-0-307-27092-4
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2009
  • Scottish Poems
    Scottish Poems
    978-0-307-26971-3
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 06, 2009
  • The Four Seasons
    The Four Seasons
    Poems
    978-0-307-26834-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 03, 2008
  • Chinese Erotic Poems
    Chinese Erotic Poems
    978-0-307-26567-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2007
  • Kipling: Poems
    Kipling: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Rudyard Kipling
    978-0-307-26711-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2007
  • Robinson: Poems
    Robinson: Poems
    Edited by Scott Donaldson
    Edwin Arlington Robinson
    978-0-307-26576-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 06, 2007
  • Burns: Poems
    Burns: Poems
    Edited by Gerard Carruthers
    Robert Burns
    978-0-307-26616-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 09, 2007
  • Mozart: Letters
    Mozart: Letters
    Introduction by Lady Wallace
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
    978-0-307-26625-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 09, 2007
  • Rumi: Poems
    Rumi: Poems
    Jalal Al-Din Rumi
    978-0-307-26352-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 06, 2006
  • Akhmatova: Poems
    Akhmatova: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Anna Akhmatova
    978-0-307-26424-4
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 16, 2006
  • The Dance
    The Dance
    Poems
    978-0-307-26350-6
    $12.50 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2006
  • Jazz Poems
    Jazz Poems
    978-1-4000-4251-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2006
  • Solitude
    Solitude
    978-1-4000-4423-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 01, 2005
  • Poems Bewitched and Haunted
    Poems Bewitched and Haunted
    978-1-4000-4388-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 13, 2005
  • The Great Cat
    The Great Cat
    Poems About Cats
    978-1-4000-4334-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 03, 2005
  • Motherhood
    Motherhood
    Poems About Mothers
    978-1-4000-4356-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2005
  • Indian Love Poems
    Indian Love Poems
    978-1-4000-4225-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 25, 2005
  • Herbert: Poems
    Herbert: Poems
    George Herbert
    978-1-4000-4329-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 02, 2004
  • Emerson: Poems
    Emerson: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Ralph Waldo Emerson
    978-1-4000-4316-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 14, 2004
  • Tennyson: Poems
    Tennyson: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Lord Alfred Tennyson
    978-1-4000-4187-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 17, 2004
  • Doggerel
    Doggerel
    Poems About Dogs
    978-1-4000-4037-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 2003
  • Haiku
    Haiku
    Edited by Peter Washington
    978-1-4000-4128-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 2003
  • Blues Poems
    Blues Poems
    978-0-375-41458-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 02, 2003
  • Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
    Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
    Poems About Food and Drink
    978-1-4000-4023-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 08, 2003
  • Browning: Poems
    Browning: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning
    978-1-4000-4022-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 14, 2003
  • Poems of the American West
    Poems of the American West
    978-0-375-41459-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 10, 2002
  • Poems of New York
    Poems of New York
    978-0-375-41504-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 13, 2002
  • Beat Poets
    Beat Poets
    978-0-375-41332-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 09, 2002
  • Lullabies and Poems for Children
    Lullabies and Poems for Children
    978-0-375-41419-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 30, 2002
  • Poems of the Sea
    Poems of the Sea
    978-0-375-41329-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 30, 2001
  • Love Speaks Its Name
    Love Speaks Its Name
    Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
    978-0-375-41170-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 15, 2001
  • Sonnets
    Sonnets
    From Dante to the Present
    978-0-375-41177-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 27, 2001
  • Persian Poets
    Persian Poets
    978-0-375-41126-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 14, 2000
  • On Wings of Song
    On Wings of Song
    Poems About Birds
    978-0-375-40749-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 28, 2000
  • Christmas Poems
    Christmas Poems
    978-0-375-40789-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 26, 1999
  • Hughes: Poems
    Hughes: Poems
    Edited by David Roessel
    Langston Hughes
    978-0-375-40551-8
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 23, 1999
  • Zen Poems
    Zen Poems
    978-0-375-40552-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 23, 1999
  • Plath: Poems
    Plath: Poems
    Selected by Diane Wood Middlebrook
    Sylvia Plath
    978-0-375-40464-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 13, 1998
  • Eliot: Poems
    Eliot: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    T. S. Eliot
    978-0-375-40185-5
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 26, 1998
  • The Roman Poets
    The Roman Poets
    978-0-375-40071-1
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 1997
  • Coleridge: Poems
    Coleridge: Poems
    Introduction by John Beer
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    978-0-375-40072-8
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 1997
  • Frost: Poems
    Frost: Poems
    Edited by John Hollander
    Robert Frost
    978-0-679-45514-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 24, 1997
  • Marriage Poems
    Marriage Poems
    978-0-679-45515-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 29, 1997
  • Love Songs and Sonnets
    Love Songs and Sonnets
    978-0-679-45465-6
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 28, 1997
  • Uyghur Poems
    Uyghur Poems
    Aziz Isa Elkun
    978-1-101-90834-1
    $20.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 12, 2023
  • English Romantic Poets
    English Romantic Poets
    978-0-593-53552-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 04, 2022
  • River Poems
    River Poems
    978-0-593-53553-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 04, 2022
  • No Place Like Home
    No Place Like Home
    Poems
    978-0-593-32129-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 01, 2022
  • Poems of London
    Poems of London
    978-0-593-32020-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 05, 2021
  • Buzz Words
    Buzz Words
    Poems About Insects
    978-1-101-90826-6
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 06, 2021
  • Poems of Healing
    Poems of Healing
    978-1-101-90825-9
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 30, 2021
  • Poems from Greek Antiquity
    Poems from Greek Antiquity
    978-1-101-90821-1
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 10, 2020
  • Border Lines
    Border Lines
    Poems of Migration
    978-1-101-90824-2
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 08, 2020
  • Montale: Poems
    Montale: Poems
    Edited by Jonathan Galassi
    Eugenio Montale
    978-1-101-90822-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 07, 2020
  • Sondheim: Lyrics
    Sondheim: Lyrics
    Edited by Peter Gethers with Russell Perreault
    Stephen Sondheim
    978-1-101-90816-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Poems About Trees
    Poems About Trees
    978-1-101-90815-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 01, 2019
  • Rumi
    Rumi
    Unseen Poems; Edited and Translated by Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz
    Rumi
    978-1-101-90810-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 10, 2019
  • Poems of Paris
    Poems of Paris
    978-1-101-90812-9
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 12, 2019
  • Reel Verse
    Reel Verse
    Poems About the Movies
    978-1-101-90803-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 22, 2019
  • Hip Hops
    Hip Hops
    Poems About Beer
    978-1-101-90791-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Pope: Poems
    Pope: Poems
    Edited by Claude Rawson
    Alexander Pope
    978-1-101-90802-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 14, 2018
  • Poems of Rome
    Poems of Rome
    978-1-101-90801-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 03, 2018
  • The Language of Flowers
    The Language of Flowers
    Poems
    978-1-101-90795-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Poems of Gratitude
    Poems of Gratitude
    978-1-101-90790-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 12, 2017
  • French Poetry
    French Poetry
    From Medieval to Modern Times
    978-1-101-90783-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2017
  • Merrill: Poems
    Merrill: Poems
    Edited by Langdon Hammer
    James Merrill
    978-1-101-90785-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 07, 2017
  • Poems About Sculpture
    Poems About Sculpture
    978-1-101-90775-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 06, 2016
  • The Echoing Green
    The Echoing Green
    Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses
    978-1-101-90773-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 15, 2016
  • Horace
    Horace
    Poems; Edited by Paul Quarrie
    Horace
    978-1-101-90767-2
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Monster Verse
    Monster Verse
    Poems Human and Inhuman
    978-0-375-71240-1
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 15, 2015
  • Measure for Measure
    Measure for Measure
    An Anthology of Poetic Meters
    978-0-375-71248-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2015
  • Poems Dead and Undead
    Poems Dead and Undead
    978-0-375-71251-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 16, 2014
  • Arabic Poems
    Arabic Poems
    978-0-375-71243-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 05, 2014
  • Poems of the American South
    Poems of the American South
    978-0-375-71244-9
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 05, 2014
  • Marvell: Poems
    Marvell: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Andrew Marvell
    978-0-8041-5296-9
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 02, 2014
  • Cavafy: Poems
    Cavafy: Poems
    Edited and Translated with notes by Daniel Mendelsohn
    C.P. Cavafy
    978-0-375-71242-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Joyce: Poems and a Play
    Joyce: Poems and a Play
    James Joyce
    978-0-375-71233-3
    $13.50 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 25, 2014
  • April Twilights and Other Poems
    April Twilights and Other Poems
    Foreword by Robert Thacker
    Willa Cather
    978-0-307-96146-4
    $20.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 26, 2013
  • Art and Artists
    Art and Artists
    Poems
    978-0-307-95938-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 10, 2012
  • Villanelles
    Villanelles
    978-0-307-95786-3
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 06, 2012
  • The Best of Archy and Mehitabel
    The Best of Archy and Mehitabel
    Introduction by E. B. White
    Don Marquis
    978-0-307-70092-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 25, 2011
  • Killer Verse
    Killer Verse
    Poems of Murder and Mayhem
    978-0-307-70093-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 06, 2011
  • Emily Dickinson: Letters
    Emily Dickinson: Letters
    Edited by Emily Fragos
    Emily Dickinson
    978-0-307-59704-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 19, 2011
  • Poems and Songs: Cohen
    Poems and Songs: Cohen
    Leonard Cohen
    978-0-307-59583-6
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2011
  • The Art of Angling
    The Art of Angling
    Poems about Fishing
    978-0-307-59703-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2011
  • Irish Poems
    Irish Poems
    978-0-307-59498-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 01, 2011
  • Millay: Poems
    Millay: Poems
    Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
    Edna St. Vincent Millay
    978-0-307-59266-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 02, 2010
  • Russian Poets
    Russian Poets
    978-0-307-26974-4
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 12, 2009
  • Poems About Horses
    Poems About Horses
    978-0-307-26925-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 28, 2009
  • Three Hundred Tang Poems
    Three Hundred Tang Poems
    978-0-307-26973-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2009
  • Music's Spell
    Music's Spell
    Poems About Music and Musicians
    978-0-307-27092-4
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 31, 2009
  • Scottish Poems
    Scottish Poems
    978-0-307-26971-3
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 06, 2009
  • The Four Seasons
    The Four Seasons
    Poems
    978-0-307-26834-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 03, 2008
  • Chinese Erotic Poems
    Chinese Erotic Poems
    978-0-307-26567-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2007
  • Kipling: Poems
    Kipling: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Rudyard Kipling
    978-0-307-26711-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2007
  • Robinson: Poems
    Robinson: Poems
    Edited by Scott Donaldson
    Edwin Arlington Robinson
    978-0-307-26576-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 06, 2007
  • Burns: Poems
    Burns: Poems
    Edited by Gerard Carruthers
    Robert Burns
    978-0-307-26616-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 09, 2007
  • Mozart: Letters
    Mozart: Letters
    Introduction by Lady Wallace
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
    978-0-307-26625-5
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 09, 2007
  • Rumi: Poems
    Rumi: Poems
    Jalal Al-Din Rumi
    978-0-307-26352-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 06, 2006
  • Akhmatova: Poems
    Akhmatova: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Anna Akhmatova
    978-0-307-26424-4
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 16, 2006
  • The Dance
    The Dance
    Poems
    978-0-307-26350-6
    $12.50 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2006
  • Jazz Poems
    Jazz Poems
    978-1-4000-4251-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 11, 2006
  • Solitude
    Solitude
    978-1-4000-4423-8
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 01, 2005
  • Poems Bewitched and Haunted
    Poems Bewitched and Haunted
    978-1-4000-4388-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 13, 2005
  • The Great Cat
    The Great Cat
    Poems About Cats
    978-1-4000-4334-7
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 03, 2005
  • Motherhood
    Motherhood
    Poems About Mothers
    978-1-4000-4356-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2005
  • Indian Love Poems
    Indian Love Poems
    978-1-4000-4225-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 25, 2005
  • Herbert: Poems
    Herbert: Poems
    George Herbert
    978-1-4000-4329-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 02, 2004
  • Emerson: Poems
    Emerson: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Ralph Waldo Emerson
    978-1-4000-4316-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 14, 2004
  • Tennyson: Poems
    Tennyson: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Lord Alfred Tennyson
    978-1-4000-4187-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 17, 2004
  • Doggerel
    Doggerel
    Poems About Dogs
    978-1-4000-4037-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 2003
  • Haiku
    Haiku
    Edited by Peter Washington
    978-1-4000-4128-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 2003
  • Blues Poems
    Blues Poems
    978-0-375-41458-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 02, 2003
  • Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
    Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
    Poems About Food and Drink
    978-1-4000-4023-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 08, 2003
  • Browning: Poems
    Browning: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning
    978-1-4000-4022-3
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 14, 2003
  • Poems of the American West
    Poems of the American West
    978-0-375-41459-6
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 10, 2002
  • Poems of New York
    Poems of New York
    978-0-375-41504-3
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 13, 2002
  • Beat Poets
    Beat Poets
    978-0-375-41332-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 09, 2002
  • Lullabies and Poems for Children
    Lullabies and Poems for Children
    978-0-375-41419-0
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 30, 2002
  • Poems of the Sea
    Poems of the Sea
    978-0-375-41329-2
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 30, 2001
  • Love Speaks Its Name
    Love Speaks Its Name
    Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
    978-0-375-41170-0
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 15, 2001
  • Sonnets
    Sonnets
    From Dante to the Present
    978-0-375-41177-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 27, 2001
  • Persian Poets
    Persian Poets
    978-0-375-41126-7
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 14, 2000
  • On Wings of Song
    On Wings of Song
    Poems About Birds
    978-0-375-40749-9
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 28, 2000
  • Christmas Poems
    Christmas Poems
    978-0-375-40789-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 26, 1999
  • Hughes: Poems
    Hughes: Poems
    Edited by David Roessel
    Langston Hughes
    978-0-375-40551-8
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 23, 1999
  • Zen Poems
    Zen Poems
    978-0-375-40552-5
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 23, 1999
  • Plath: Poems
    Plath: Poems
    Selected by Diane Wood Middlebrook
    Sylvia Plath
    978-0-375-40464-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 13, 1998
  • Eliot: Poems
    Eliot: Poems
    Edited by Peter Washington
    T. S. Eliot
    978-0-375-40185-5
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 26, 1998
  • The Roman Poets
    The Roman Poets
    978-0-375-40071-1
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 1997
  • Coleridge: Poems
    Coleridge: Poems
    Introduction by John Beer
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    978-0-375-40072-8
    $15.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 11, 1997
  • Frost: Poems
    Frost: Poems
    Edited by John Hollander
    Robert Frost
    978-0-679-45514-1
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 24, 1997
  • Marriage Poems
    Marriage Poems
    978-0-679-45515-8
    $14.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 29, 1997
  • Love Songs and Sonnets
    Love Songs and Sonnets
    978-0-679-45465-6
    $18.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 28, 1997
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