Essential Shakespeare

by Ted Hughes

Overview

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060887957
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/14/2006
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.12(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Ted Hughes was born in 1930 in West Yorkshire, England. He is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently, Wolfwatching. Mr. Hughes was appointed poet laureate of England in 1984. He lives in North Tawton, Devon.

Read an Excerpt

The Essential Shakespeare

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By Ted Hughes

Ecco Press

Copyright © 1991 Ted Hughes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0880013133

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Chapter One

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: "Thou single wilt prove none."

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Essential Shakespeare by Ted Hughes Copyright © 1991 by Ted Hughes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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