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Interested in poetry? Download these 7 books now!

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique for her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality. Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that her work became public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890. Source: Wikipedia
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Merry Christmas to Dan K & family in Massachusetts, USA! Just maybe one of these lines was written in your house. :)
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The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. The stories are set in a forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. The theme is echoed in the triumph of protagonists including Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal over their enemies, as well as Mowgli's. Another important theme is of law and freedom; the stories are not about animal behaviour, still less about the Darwinian struggle for survival, but about human archetypes in animal form. They teach respect for authority, obedience, and knowing one's place in society with "the law of the jungle", but the stories also illustrate the freedom to move between different worlds, such as when Mowgli moves between the jungle and the village. Critics have also noted the essential wildness and lawless energies in the stories, reflecting the irresponsible side of human nature. The Jungle Book has remained popular, partly through its many adaptations for film and other media. Critics such as Swati Singh have noted that even critics wary of Kipling for his supposed imperialism have admired the power of his storytelling. The book has been influential in the scout movement, whose founder, Robert Baden-Powell, was a friend of Kipling's. Percy Grainger composed his Jungle Book Cycle around quotations from the book.
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Download a scanned version from the Library of Congress here. Additional illustrations, including Cover Art source, available from the Library of Congress here. Other versions of the audiobook are available free! Find your favorite recording here on LibriVox.
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William Blake is a famous Romantic poet and artist. This book includes text of the poems in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, as well as an original facsimile of Blake's illustrations in color.
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Walter Crane's beautifully illustrated version of Aesop's fables, shortened and put into limericks for the younger reader and first published in 1887. Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop: ... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. -Public Domain Review
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The Prophet is Lebanese-American writer Khalil Gibran’s best known work. In the book, the prophet Almustafa is returning home after 12 years in the fictional city of Orphalese. Before he boards his ship, he speaks to the people of Orphalese on a number of universal themes such as love, work, marriage, beauty, and death, which form this collection of 26 short fables or prose poetry. First published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print since, and has been translated into over a hundred languages.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

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"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable." - Quote from Page 15 ->
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A poem by the Latin poet Virgil, the second of his three known works. "Georgic" means "to work the land," and on such matters of labour Virgil dwells and celebrates. In a dramatic survey of practices including agriculture, viticulture, animal husbandry, and bee-keeping, as well as the themes and mythos of labour, pastoral life, the glory of Roman citizenship, and the chaos that disrupts the fruitfulness of our daily lives, Virgil weaves a lyrical tapestry of both Greek and Roman thread portraying the complex relationship between humanity and the divine. (Summary by George Emerson)
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Thank you to Camille M. and Tina F. for suggesting this book!
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Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English and in many other languages.
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Alternative translations available from Wikipedia, Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg. About the Author: Omar Khayyam (; Persian: عمر خیّام‎ [oˈmæɾ xæjˈjɒːm]; 18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) was a Persian polymath, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. He was born in Neyshabur, in northeastern Persia, and was contemporary with the rule of the Seljuks around the time of the First Crusade. As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics. Khayyam also contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom.: 284  As an astronomer, he designed the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle: 659  that provided the basis for the Persian calendar that is still in use after nearly a millennium. There is a tradition of attributing poetry to Omar Khayyam, written in the form of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt رباعیات‎). This poetry became widely known to the English-reading world in a translation by Edward FitzGerald (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859), which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.
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