Literacy

Our Best Selling Poetry Books

• The Patriotic Poems - Walt Whiteman is one of the most famous and inspiring American poets. A poet who is widely considered as the American father of free verses. This book is a collection of his patriotic poems divided into 4 parts; Poems of War, Poems of after War, Poems of America and Poems of Democracy. These poems show pain, celebration, courage and unity. He often likes to celebrate love, friendship, democracy and nature through his work. His major concern was to introspect, explore and celebrate his own self and his personality and secondly he wanted to eulogize democracy and the American nation with its achievements and potential. His work continues to receive huge readership across generations and the fact that he mostly wrote his poems in first person makes it even more meaningful. By reading his astonishing work one learns to appreciate the things and find beauty within. 

• Phantasmagoria and Other Poems is a splendid collection of poems written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen named Lewis Carroll. It was Carroll's longest poem published in 1869, divided into seven Cantons, illustrated by A. B. Frost. Carroll has written a supernatural amazing poem, in his narrative he  shows interaction between Phantom ( a ghost) and a man Tibbets. Author expresses that on a winter night while he returned home he felt surprising presence of someone else that was a white, wavy gloomy appearance of a ghost. Carroll says ghosts are not unlike humans. Like humans they follow hierarchy, do jobs to haunt. They live in society and follow the social rules, violation means sufferings. As men fear to dark they also fear. They live in gloomy and dark environment and they fear from light. In the end, ghost realized he came in wrong house, so he left in a friendly way shaking hands. Some other pleasing and appreciating poems are-The Sea Dirge, A Game of Fives, Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur, Fame's Funny Trumpet, Hiawatha's Photographing, A Valentine, Hunting of the Snark etc.

• The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, nonsense poem by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson alias Lewis Carroll, first published in 1876. The poem was devoted to Gertrude Chataway, a child friend of the author. The poem explains the story of a team of 10, consisting of nine humans and a Beaver, on a search to find a legendary creature called the Snark. The hunting turns dangerous, for the barren land is full of dreadful  creatures- and there is also the chance that they may find, instead of a common Snark, a fatal variety known as the Boojum. It is a dark fantasy about a team of ridiculous and abnormal people who go to an extraordinary, eerie land in search of a strange creature called 'The Snark'. The story follows a team of 10 trying to hunt the Snark, a creature which may turn out to be a highly hazardous Boojum. The only crewmember to find out the Snark quietly disappears, leading the novelist to explain that the Snark was a Boojum after all. It illustrates with infinite humour the impossible journey of incredible crew to find an unbelievable creature. This  poem has been called the longest and best maintained nonsense poem in the English language. 

• Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote the love tale and occult aspiration book Zanoni in 1842. It narrates the tale of Zanoni, the main character, who possesses occult abilities and is aware of the key to perpetual life.The eternal Rosicrucian brother Zanoni cannot fall in love without losing his immortality, yet he does so with Viola Pisani, a talented young opera soprano from Naples and the misunderstood musician Pisani's daughter. While also in love with Viola, an Englishman by the name of Glyndon hesitates to propose marriage before renunciation it in favor of esoteric research. The French Revolution is when the plot begins to take shape. Since the Chaldean civilization, Zanoni has existed. Zanoni ignores his mentor Mejnor's advice to avoid having a romantic relationship. In the end, he marries Viola, and the couple had a kid. Zanoni starts to lose his gift of immortality as he encounters more of mankind. During the French Revolution, he ultimately dies on the guillotine.

• Baudelaire was the first really modern poet and the finest French poet of the 19th century. His direct and indirect contributions to modern literature are immense.Flowers of Evil: A Selection includes 53 poems that the editors believe best reflect the entire work and those, in their judgement, have been most skillfully translated into English.Baudelaire tries to draw beauty from evil in The Flowers of Evil. He believed that contemporary poetry ought to express life's artificial and contradictory aspects.The goal of life is to avoid reality as much as possible through wine, opium, travel, and passion. Baudelaire frequently used sensual imagery to capture the fervent emotion of the ideal.Baudelaire's primary source of symbolism is women. They represent both the steady ascent toward Satan and the elevation toward God, as he put it. His mind is illuminated by women, but they are also terrible vampires that amplify his spleen, or bad temper.A potential love interest in "To a Passerby" turns out to be a dreadful demise. Because Baudelaire frequently uses religious and fantastical images, death seems more likely now. The speaker is left on his own to think horrifying thoughts about himself and to wish for a comforting death.

• J. Meade Falkner's short story The Lost Stradivarius explores ghosts and the potential evil that might be devoted to an item-in this case, an exceptionally excellent Stradivarius violin. This novel has been known as "one of Falkner's three renowned novels'' and as a "psychological romance." "The Lost Stradivarius'' (1895), a timeless tale about the paranormal power of spirits, is horrifying to the extreme. While practicing in his rooms at Oxford University, skilled violinist John Maltravers observed an unusual phenomenon: whenever a particular piece was played, a strange presence appeared to enter. Unable to explain this away, Maltravers build gradually unsettled, until he makes a staggering discovery-tucked away in a cupboard in his room is a valuable Stradivarius! Obsessed with this valuable treasure, he gradually withdraws, unaware that the evil holding this ideal violin is an initiation to take control of him. Wandering from Britain to Italy, the novel's story involves lordly depravity, family love, and the calamity of obsession, all transmitted in a "strong '' serious tone, not unusual in old-styled literature. Prior to M. R. James's ghost stories from various years were referred to as "novels," and James may have conceived and written novels.

• First published by Elbert Hubbard at the Roycroft shop in 1899, A Persian Pearl and Other Essays is a collection of five essays written by Clarence S. Darrow. This was one of the most well-renowned works by Darrow which got him in the conversation amongst other great writers. Considering his long and successful career as an attorney, even being dubbed "The Great Defender '', his success in writing seems inevitable. The collection contains "A Persian Pearl'', "Walt Whitman", "Robert Burns", "Realism in Literature and Art", and "The Skeleton in the Closet". Out of all the essays, Darrow's essay Walt Whitman remains the most in the conversation. The essay is significant as it demonstrates how closely Darrow read Whitman's poems and how his analyses were more farsighted and intelligent compared to the critics of that period. Darrow claimed that Whitman's works were neither poem nor prose, instead they were "remotely allied to the wild chanting of the primitive bards, who looked about at the fresh new marvels of earth and sky and sea, and unhampered by form and rules and customs, sand of the miracles of the universe and the mysteries of life". Such masterful observations can be found throughout this collection.

• The supernatural short tale Clarimonde was penned by Théophile Gautier. It tells the tale of Romuald, a priest, and Clarimonde, a stunning woman who later turns out to be a vampire. An old priest named Romuald is asked in the opening of the story if he has ever been in love. He replies that he has, but he characterizes the incident as a bewitchment to which he fell. Then he tells the tale of Clarimonde, his first love.

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