Akron Public Library

'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.' One of the most popular of the Romantic poets, Keats' poetry is suffused with adoration for natural beauty, exploration of joy and pain, and ideas on the transience of life. This new collection combines many of Keats' well-loved poems - from 'Ode to a Nightingale' to 'Bright Star' - with his letters, often studied, analysed and admired in parallel...

"In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety, or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language. And they were barely out of their teens when their...

"When British poet Amy Key was growing up, she envisioned a life shaped by love--and Joni Mitchell's album Blue was her inspiration. 'Blue became part of my language of intimacy,' she writes, recalling the dozens of times she played the record as a teen, 'an intimacy of disclosure, vulnerability, unadorned feeling that I thought I'd eventually share with a romantic other.' As the years ticked by, she held on to this very specific idea of romance like...

The biography of an English poet.

From Last Call to On Stranger Tides to Declare to Three Days to Never, any book by the inimitable Tim Powers is a wonder. With Hide Me Among the Graves, it's possible that the uniquely ingenious Powers has surpassed even himself. A breathtaking historical thriller in which art and the supernatural collide, Hide Me Among the Graves transports readers back to mid-19th century London and features a reformed ex-prostitute, a veterinarian, and the vampire...

The story of a notorious shipwreck that had prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of silence with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.

Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there; is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?-- but he has a strange feeling there's a class to teach. And isn't that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards? Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Bronts͡, the Brownings,...