Study Poetry

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent and is a major text of Hinduism. Its discussion of human goals (artha or 'purpose', kama or 'pleasure', dharma or 'duty' and moksha or 'liberation') takes place in a long-standing tradition, attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'self') and the workings of karma.

Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater’s compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the “holy writ of beauty.” It was Pater’s cry of “art for art’s sake” that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater’s essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

Joan, Tisha, and Lila are three single, ambitious party girls embarking on a journey where they attempt to give up sex and draw nearer to God. Giving up their boyfriends and club hopping for empty beds and Bible study is more challenging than they could have imagined. The Single Sister Experiment is a fast-paced, drama-filled ride that you don’t want to miss!

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

The 55 minutes you spend listening to this audiobook can be magical. Some of these stories and ponderings will be understood clearly, while others may elude you, but not to worry, you will want to listen several times, and the meaning will come to you. Like all great writing, these stories will remain with you.

This educational drama captures the experiences of a young World War I soldier who was touched, inspired, and changed forever by war poetry. Through vivid readings and recollections, we examine the work of 16 poets.

Under the order of King Pelias, Jason embarks on a perilous journey to steal the Golden Fleece from the Land of Colchis. Far from heroic, Jason is the typical everyman. Often compared with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts is the only surviving poem from the Hellenistic period and was hugely influential on later literature, especially the Roman poetry of Virgil and Ovid.

The CliffsNotes study guide on Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, and critical commentaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work.

Jason and the Golden Fleece is one of the finest tales of Ancient Greece, an epic journey of adventure and trial standing beside similar stories of Perseus, Theseus and the Labours of Heracles. The finest classic account comes from Apollonius of Rhodes, the Greek poet of the 3rd century BCE and librarian at Alexandria. Though less well-known than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and much shorter, it is an epic poem which is both exciting and moving, with remarkably vivid portraits of the main characters, Jason and Medea.

The Argonautica, also known as Jason and the Golden Fleece or Jason and the Argonauts, is the only surviving epic poem from Hellenistic Greece. It is a masterpiece whose story was well known to the audiences of the time. Virgil and other later poets were greatly influenced by it. Its author, Apollonius, was a well-known third century BC scholar living in Alexandria during the great age of Ptolomaic scholarship, and his bold attempt at writing a Homeric epic about Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece faced a daunting audience of knowledgeable contemporaries.

The prophetic books of the Old Testament are named for the many prophets chosen by God to warn the Israelite people of their waywardness and urge them to repent and stay faithful to him. The majority of these books were written before the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, but several of the minor prophets detail the return to Jerusalem from their exile to rebuild the city.

Walt Whitman explores the freedom of the wanderer, the sorrow of the pallbearer, and the spirit of the adventurer in his remarkable collection of poems, Leaves Of Grass. Both an explorer of cultural thought and a lover of sensual pleasure, Whitman champions the cause of common men, and revels in emotional and physical love. In plain and beautiful language, Whitman redefined the world of poetry.

Aquinas at Prayer draws attention to important aspects of Aquinas's life and work which have been all too often overlooked or forgotten. Today Aquinas is almost exclusively regarded as an outstanding scholastic philosopher and theologian. But what is little known is that Aquinas was, first and last, a teacher of the Bible - a Master of the Sacred Page. Moreover there is a distinctly mystical character to his theology. And, as a writer, he was not only a poet but, arguably, the greatest Latin poet of the Middle Ages.

Beautifully performed poetry enhanced with music. Detailed commentary and analysis from experts. A fantastic introduction to classic poetry, allowing listeners to begin to appreciate and criticise form and content themselves.

El Tarot es un arte. Y, como todo arte, llega a su cumbre cuando se transforma en poesía. En "Yo, el Tarot", síntesis poética que Alejandro Jodorowsky nos ofrece de cada uno de los 22 arcanos mayores, se manifiesta la esencia y la voz de estos 22 "arquetipos".

Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult.

This series, written by Charlotte Unsworth, a prolific blogger on English literature and English teacher at Skipton Girls High School, will examine each of the 15 poems you are required to study across AQA's Love and Relationships poetry anthology for GCSE. From Seamus Heaney's 'Follower' to Charlotte Mew's 'The Farmer's Bride', each poem will be fully examined, looking at structure, form and language so that you will gain an in-depth understanding of all the aspects that you need to study.

Our audio study guide on the OCR Love and Relationships Poetry Anthology for GCSE English Literature provides both readings of the poems and an extensive analysis of each. The tutorials have been designed to help develop a range of skills, such as analysing language, making comparisons and inferring meaning and ideas. There are also bonus chapters on unseen poetry and how to plan your answers for the exams. The series has been written by Rebecca Kleanthous, who is both an experienced teacher and specialist poetry examiner.