Denis Daly

When W.B. Yeats discovered Rabindranath Tagore's work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man, whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore's poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless: "I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the...

At the dawn of World War I, poet Sassoon exchanged his pastoral pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. This collection of his epigrammatic and satirical poetry conveys the shocking brutality and pointlessness of the Great War and includes "Counter-Attack," "'They," "The General," and "Base Details."

A collection of Love Poems "Welladay! Welladay!, For the winds of May!, Love is unhappy when love is away!" The title of the book, "Chamber Music," was reportedly a pun relating to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, though this seems to be a later embellishment by Joyce of the title's meaning.

Bibliography: p. 131.

Presents Shakespeare's dark comedy about young lovers and a Jewish money lender who demands a pound of flesh in payment for a debt. Includes explanatory notes on facing pages, scene-by-scene plot summaries, a key to famous lines and phrases, a modern perspective essay, and an introduction to the play and the language of Shakespeare.