Dante Alighieri is one of the greatest poets in world history. His brilliant epic, "The Divine Comedy", an imagined journey through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, continues to captivate readers. "Critical Companion to Dante" provides a reliable, up-to-date, and encyclopedic source of information on Dante's life and work for high school and college-level students, teachers, libraries, and the general public. This new title covers Dante's entire canon, including his beautiful love poems in "La Vita Nuova", his philosophical works, and much more.

"The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables", "Young Goodman Brown," and "Rappaccini's Daughter" are staples of high school English classes across the country. Nathaniel Hawthorne's works and characters have left a lasting impression on writers, scholars, and readers around the world. "Critical Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne" offers critical entries on Hawthorne's novels, short stories, travel writing, criticism, and other works, as well as portraits of characters, including Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth.

"Critical Companion to Walt Whitman" contains entries on every one of Walt Whitman's poems, from the widely recognized "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," to his minor works. His major prose works, such as "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" and "Democratic Vistas", each edition of "Leaves of Grass", and unique terms used or coined by Whitman, such as "Eidolons" and "Paumanok," are also covered. Helping readers understand the influences on his life are entries on Whitman's family, friends, relatives, and acquaintances; important places where he lived and worked; and ideas important to his work.

Known for his favorite themes of New England and nature, Robert Frost may well be the most famous American poet of the 20th century. His classic works include the poems "The Road Not Taken," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Death of the Hired Man," and many more. "Critical Companion to Robert Frost" is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of this great American poet. This accessible volume combines extensive critical analysis with in-depth information on Frost's life, providing a one-stop resource for students.

Best known for his works "The Waste Land", "Four Quartets", and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot is one of the most popular 20th-century poets studied in high school and college English classes today. Eliot's masterful use of classical allusions throughout his works demonstrates the great importance he placed on tradition and its place within literary history. Believing that the fragments of a once-great culture surrounded the modern world through literature, he used his writing to recreate the past through tradition.