Poetry

Dante’s best friend and a major exponent of the dolce stil novo, Guido Cavalcanti has had a lasting influence upon Italian poetry and is best known to English readers through the essays, translations and adaptations of Ezra Pound. Born from the...
By: Guido Cavalcanti

Dante’s dramatic journey through the circles of hell in search of redemption – and his encounter with devils, monsters and the souls of some of the greatest sinners who ever walked on earth – is one of the cornerstones of Western literature, the...
By: Dante Alighieri

The present selection traces the development of Yeats’s verse, encompassing the poet’s interest in Irish folklore and national identity, his engagement with the political situation of his day and the rich symbolism that is the hallmark of his work...
By: W.B. Yeats

Foscolo ranks among the most famous and enduringly popular poets in Italian literature, and in this collection, the only available in the English language, his most significant are collected in J.G. Nichols’s lucid verse translation. Expressing the...
By: Ugo Foscolo

In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death and corruption, featuring a host of colourful characters from lascivious...
By: Giovanni Boccaccio

This collection of Dante Alighieri’s Canzoniere, translated for the first time in its entirety into English, charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita Nova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by...
By: Dante Alighieri

Published for the first time in 1831, and here presented in a dual-language edition with some of his lesser-known unpublished poems, Leopardi's poetical masterpiece is an unsurpassed anatomy of man's unhappiness on earth. Trapped between an...
By: Giacomo Leopardi

Following in the footsteps of Horace’s Ars Poetica , Boileau’s Art of Poetry lays down, in four entertaining books dealing with all forms and genres of poetry, the codes and rules for good versification. This beautiful translation proved to have a...
By: Nicolas Boileau

Writing clandestine sonnets in local dialect for over fifteen years whilst leading a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli erected a lasting poetical monument to the people of nineteenth-century Rome. Set...
By: Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli