World Poetry
Subtitle: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time
Contributors: Katharine Washburn (Editor); John S. Major (Editor); Clifton Fadiman (Editor)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: March 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 1376
ISBN-13: 9780393041309
Copyright date: 1998
Notes: **The one necessary book of poetry for every home and library.**

This long-awaited, indispensable volume contains more than 1600 poems drawn from dozens of languages and cultures, and spans a period of more than 4000 years from ancient Sumer and Egypt to the late twentieth century. _World Poetry_ encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.  

While _World Poetry_ includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer―more than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right.  

This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.
Table of contents: title: Poets of the Bronze and Iron Ages (2200-250 B.C.) --; title: Classical empires, East and West (750 B.C.-A.D. 500) --; title: Postclassical world (A.D. 250-1200) --; title: Rise of the vernacular (950-1450) --; title: Renaissance in Europe; late traditional verse from the Americas, South Asia, and East Asia (1350-1625) --; title: Seventeenth century (1600-1700) --; title: Eighteenth century into the Early Twentieth century (1700-1915) --; title: Twentieth century (1915- ).