A love poem in five books.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story.

"Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems.Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains...

Explains that Shakespeare's poetry taps into all aspects of human nature. Traces the early life of the Bard and the influence of his classical education in the creation of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece. In contrast, the Shakespearean sonnet is viewed as a personal rather than a public construction. The rhyming and thematic structure of the Italian, Petrachian, sonnet is compared to Shakespeare's "English" sonnet. "The Phoenix and the Turtle",...