Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse

by Christopher Burns

Now in print as well. For students and poetry lovers old and new, Immortal Poets offers a deep selection from the works of the greatest English and American poets, along with brief biographies of each one and a portrait of the times they lived in. There are fascinating people behind the great poems. In this new anthology, and Christopher Burns has brought them to life. The book includes 547 poems and 120 poets from Beowulf to Robert Frost. About 200 of the poems appear in The Seashell Anthology and in The Norton Anthology—they are the classics. But Immortal Poets goes Shakespeare (27), Dickinson (21), Millay (16), Whitman (15), Sandburg (14), and Frost (13). It also includes the full text of such long works as “The Waste Land,” ”Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Evangeline,” and “The Raven,” as well as generous excerpts from “Beowulf”, Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, and FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. The stories behind the poems are John Wilmot had John Dryden beaten up in an alley by thugs, Alexander Pope traveled with a Great Dane and two loaded pistols to protect himself from critics he had insulted. Dante Rossetti hired men to open his wife’s grave after six years and retrieve his collection of unpublished poems. On his seventieth birthday, John Greenleaf Whittier had a few of his friends over for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain. Many of the great poets died poor, eight committed suicide, Tichborne was drawn and quartered at twenty-three, Marlowe died in a barroom brawl, and Raleigh was beheaded. But many others lived long and colorful three won the Nobel Prize for Literature; Robert Service, who wrote “The Cremation of Sam Magee”, made a million dollars from his poetry and died on the French Riviera at eighty-four. Available also as an ebook, the anthology is deeply indexed by author, title and period. Short illustrated biographies are included for each poet, as well as descriptions of each group, from the Elizabethans to the Moderninsts. Poets represented by four poems or more William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Butler Yeats, Robert Browning, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, A. E. Housman, William Carlos Williams, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Laurence Hope, Charlotte Mew, Thomas Campion, D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, Langston Hughes, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Herrick, John Keats, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Dowson, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Anna Wickham, Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Wilmot, Alexander Pope, William Cowper, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, Arthur Symons, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie, Wallace Stevens, and Archibald MacLeish. (rel 2.0) Christopher Burns is a long-time media executive and editor of The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry, the best-selling poetry book on Amazon

Genres: Poetry

Kindle Edition

First published February 12, 2011

About the author

NARRATOR:

Christopher Burns has performed in the London and Broadway performances of Stones in His Pockets and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in acting from NYU and a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature from Colorado College. In addition to Broadway, Christopher has appeared onstage in numerous New York City and regional shows as well as on TV and film.


(source: Dreamscape)


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Ashley Schott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I was familiar with many of these poems, I still learned a lot from this anthology about the poets themselves and the times in which they wrote. It was interesting to see the evolution of poetry over time as presented here. Great anthology!

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lengthy

Not much was original in this book. Only a brief write up of the poets life, influences, and death. It did have a decent selection from the poets and a wide range of poets. With so many to choose from I can only imagine how difficult it was to narrow this down. All of the more popular poets and many lesser known s were represented.

#GoodreadsGiveaway

[Robin Christophersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed the synopsis of each major poetry movement and brief biographies.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting and useful book.

[Jennifer Mazalic · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed the stories and the poetry it reminded me more of a textbook for an English class than something to read for fun. That made it a lot more difficult for me to get through it.

[Val]

I was interested in reading this because I wanted to explore classic poetry. It did not disappoint: it's a massive collection of classic poetry with insightful biographies, and the Kindle edition was easy to navigate.

I did not complete this book, but I don't believe it was meant to be read cover-to-cover, and I plan to reference it again and again.

(I won a free copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.)

[Gill]

A useful book because it gives contextual notes in brief on the different periods ,styles and author great range

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

good choises