Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. Thomas Hardy's first love was always poetry. It was not until 1898, when he was 58 years old, having already established his reputation with 14 novels and over 40 short stories, that his first book of poetry, "Wessex Poems" was published. For the final 30 years of his life he abandoned fiction and devoted himself entirely to poetry.

The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose

Eliot's own notes to his masterpiece were described by Eliot himself, as Rainey here relates, as padding that took on a life of its own as the controversies surrounding the poem took off in the '20s. That's just one of the tidbits in this terrific edition of a modernist work that retains its power to shock, as well as a high degree of allusive difficulty. 

The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe

Mary Blachford Tighe was born in Dublin in 1772 and became a poet by the age of seventeen. Her enormously popular 1805 epic poem Psyche; or, The Legend of Love made her a fixture of English literary history for much of the nineteenth century. In more recent years, however, Tighe’s fame has lain not with the considerable merits of her own work but rather with her early influence on Keats’s poetry.

The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems (Bantam Classic)

Affordable, compact, and authoritative, this one-volume edition of The Annotated Milton encompasses the monumental sweep of John Milton’s poetry. Here are Milton’s early works, including his first great poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the light and lyrical “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the masque Comus, and the lushly beautiful pastoral elegy “Lycidas.” 

Selected Poems of Byron (Wordsworth Poetry Library)

'I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be', wrote Byron (1788-1824) in his comic masterpiece Don Juan, which follows the adventures of the hero across the Europe and near East which Byron knew so well, touching on the major political, cultural and social concerns of the day.
This selection includes all of that poem, and selections from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the satirical poems English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and A Vision of Judgement.