"William Blake is one of England's most fascinating writers; he was not only a groundbreaking poet, but also a painter, engraver, radical, and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by his contemporaries, his powerful and richly symbolic poetry has been a fertile source of inspiration to the many writers and artists who have followed in his footsteps. In this collection Patti Smith brings togetherher personal favorites of Blake's poems,...

Presents a selection of ballads, narrative poems, epigrams, odes, and other poetry, from "Mandalay" and "If" to less-familiar poems.

To the nineteenth-century reader, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was the archetype of the Romantic literary hero, a figure admired and emulated as much for the revolutionary panache with which he lived his life as the brio and allure of his verse. Our century has seen him more clearly as a poet whose intellectual toughness, satiric gifts, and utter inability to be boring have made him one of the great comic spirits in our literature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was the master impresario of English Romanticism, an enormously erudite and tireless critic, lecturer, and polemicist who almost single-handedly created the intellectual climate in which the Romantic movement was received and understood. He was also, in poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, the most uncanny, surreal, and startling of the great English poets.