Helen Plum Library

Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats is considered one of the most important figures in the second generation of English Romantic poets. Born on Halloween in 1795, John Keats lived a very short life, dying at the age of twenty-five from tuberculosis. In 1814 John Keats began an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary and by 1816 had achieved his apothecary's license, which allowed him to practice medicine....

From PBS: British actor Derek Jacobi narrates this portrait of author Graham Greene, a British spy, doubting Catholic and manic-depressive who wrote critically acclaimed best-sellers, including The Quiet American, Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair and The Third Man. The documentary weaves Greene's novels and movies into the story of his life and reveals an extraordinary man who traveled the globe to escape the boredom of ordinary existence. Actor...

An exciting documentary following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe to discover the mystery behind the man who wrote such classics as “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and countless others.

"Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative novel about an aging poet laureate who "sells out" by agreeing to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI"--

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde celebrates the undeniable voice of a woman who wrote, in the words of Adrienne Rich, "poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity ... a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America ... These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."

"An engrossing new biography of Sylvia Plath focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual growth and achievement, restoring the vivid creative woman behind the longtime Plath myths perpetuated by a pathology-based approach to her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark here brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, MA who had poetic ambition from a very young age, and was an accomplished, published...

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and...

A collection of poems profiles the Chicago author who gave voice to the urban African American experience in the twentieth century

Dylan Thomas is as legendary for his raucous life as for his literary genius. The author of the immortal poems Death Shall Have No Dominion, Before I Knocked, and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, as well as the short story A Christmas in Wales, and the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood, published his first book, 18 Poems, in 1934, when he was only twenty years old. When he died in New York in 1953, at age thirty-nine, the myths took hold: he...

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Wang Wei.