English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald

William Collins · Edward Fitzgerald

ene 2010 · Cosimo, Inc.

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Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume XLI is the second of three volumes that ambitiously survey half a milliennium of poetry in the English language. More than 300 works by 60 authors in this volume alone span the 18th and 19th centuries, and include: [ George Sewell: "The Dying Man in His Garden" [ Alison Rutherford Cockburn: "The Flowers of the Forest" [ Henry Fielding: "A Hunting Song" [ Oliver Goldsmith: "The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society" [ Richard Brinsley Sheridan: "Drinking Song" [ Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne: "The Auld House" [ William Blake: "The Tiger" [ William Wordsworth: "Nature and the Poet" [ Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [ Sir Walter Scott: "To a Lock of Hair" [ Thomas Campbell: "The Soldier's Dream" [ George Gordon, Lord Byron: "She Walks in Beauty" [ Percy Bysshe Shelley: "To a Skylark" [ John Keats: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" [ Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Sonnets" [ and much more.

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Edward FitzGerald (March 31, 1809-June 14, 1883), English man of letters. A dilettante and scholar, FitzGerald went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent most of his life living in seclusion in Suffolk. His masterpiece, a translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, appeared anonymously in 1859 and passed unnoticed until Dante Gabriel Rossetti made it famous. Revised editions followed in 1868, 1872, and 1879. FitzGerald's Rubaiyat has long been one of the most popular English poems. Although actually a paraphrase rather than a translation of a poem by the 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, it retains the spirit of the original in its poignant expression of a philosophy counseling man to live life to the fullest while he can. Among FitzGerald's other works are Euphranor (1851), a Platonic dialogue, and Polonius (1852), a collection of aphorisms.