From John Donne, through the great poets of the Romantic era – Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley – to WB Yeats in the early 20th century, this set of ten volumes presents the work of some of the most important and best-loved poets in the English language. Each book comprises a representative collection of poems, with a short introduction, and the set includes an eleventh volume, a journal. The other poets are Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde.

‘Truth’ was the theme of the 25th National Poetry Day in 2019, and for this celebratory anthology a great range of people – writers, footballers, teachers and even an astronaut – were asked to nominate poems that spoke truth to them. The result was this volume of 100 ‘poems that matter’, whether dreaming of pleasure-domes with Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816) or facing the real and ‘half terrible’ world in Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones’ (2015).

Although famous now for his Gothic horror tales, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was, first and foremost, a poet: The Raven and Other Poems brought him fame – but not fortune – when it was published in 1845. This collection covers the full range of Poe’s poetry, and includes a selection of prose poems.

Since 1609, when they were first published, Shakespeare’s sonnets have fascinated readers, both with the depth of the poet’s insight into the variety of love and the passage of time and with the mysteries of the beautiful Young Man, the Rival Poet and the Dark Lady. This volume presents all 154 sonnets, with a brief introduction.

As well as the famous ‘Hunting of the Snark’ and verses such as ‘The Mock Turtle’s Song’ from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this little volume brings together less familiar poems from the master of nonsense and wordplay, including ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, ‘The Crocodile’ and ‘Phantasmagoria’.

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This volume is the most complete edition to date of his poetry and verse translations, and the first critical edition. The contents establish a definitive text and canon for the poetry, including previously unpublished material, with extensive commentary and notes placing each poem in context and identifying resonances across Beckett's work as a whole.

Keeping true to the style of the originals, the poet and translator David Slavitt renders John Milton’s Latin poems in deft and imaginative modern English. Introduced by Gordon Teskey, this collection is in three parts with titles referring to the metre of the poems: the elegies and epigrams and ‘The Book of the Woods’, containing various metres. Slightly off-mint.

‘I used to think it was a narrow road/ From here to the underworld/ But it’s as broad as the sun’. Reflecting on mortality and her own journey, this was the final book by the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore (1952–2017). It was Costa Book of the Year, 2017.

Clive James describes these poems as combining ‘American cultural information with a British range of tones’, and they deal with intriguing subjects, including the fate of Nefertiti’s statue in Nazi Germany, Whitman’s final moments and the Iliad, Hollywood-style. Off-mint.

The first half of this collection, ‘My Own Blue Eye’, reflects on dreams, visions, identity, character and the passing of time. The second, ‘Laurels and Donkeys’, responds to the poets of the First World War and the ravages of today’s conflicts.

Dante, with Virgil as his guide, descends through the circles of Hell, from the limbo of the unbaptized to Lucifer and Judas Iscariot in the deepest chasm. This is the first part of The Divine Comedy, translated by Longfellow in 1867, and now presented in Canterbury Classics’ Word Cloud series. Flexibound in mock leather with foil embossed quotations. Off-mint.

The second stage in Dante's journey to redemption, Purgatory is presented here in a verse translation by JG Nichols, with English and the original Italian on facing pages, notes and a concise introduction to each canto.

This anthology brings together poetic responses to 80 great composers, from the Renaissance to the 21st century. The texts include John Dryden’s ode on the death of Purcell, Elizabeth Jennings’ poem on Mozart’s Horn Concertos and Michael Longley on Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.

Edited, with an introduction, by the poet Michael Longley, this selection of war poetry by Robert Graves (1895–1985) includes the poems written at the Front and some, such as 'A Letter from Wales', written in retrospect during the 1920s. The book is part of Faber's Poets of the Great War series.

Set in 13th-century Florence, part autobiography and part religious allegory, Dante's early masterpiece follows his quest to find a poetic idiom worthy of Beatrice, whom he had loved since boyhood. Her early death plunges him into an emotional turmoil that finds relief only through his faith in her continuing spiritual influence. The work is presented here in a verse translation by Anthony Mortimer.

This is Seamus Heaney’s last completed work, an inspired translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas travels through death’s dark door, into the underworld to meet the spirit of his father. The poem is read here by Ian McKellen.

The popular ideal of the 'inspired' artist - beautiful, brooding and damned - owes its origins to the poets, writers and artists of the Romantic period. In this volume from the National Portrait Gallery's Insight series, Richard Holmes explores the portraits and the lives of the Romantics in a series of more than 28 subtly interwoven biographies, ranging from William Blake to JMW Turner, and including Byron, Shelley, Keats and the circle that formed around Coleridge and Wordsworth.

John Worthen's innovative introduction discusses Coleridge's interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks as well as his poetry, literary criticism and biography.

Part of the pleasure of poetry is unravelling its mysteries. Who is Ozymandias? What is the Snark? Who is Crazy Jane? In this playful, perceptive book, the acclaimed poet John Fuller teases out the conundrums, double-entendres, red herrings and misleading titles of some of our best-loved poetry, from Shelley and Browning to Eliot and Bishop, to help us reach the rewards and revelations at its heart.

This anthology brings together poems by 21 authors, including Wilfred Owen, DH Lawrence and Katharine Tynan, to illustrate how contemporary responses to the First World War changed from an initial excitement at the opportunity to display courage and chivalry, through years of bitterness and rage, to calls for compassion and reconciliation. The poems are juxtaposed with paintings, mostly from the Imperial War Museum’s collection, which depict wartime scenes on and off the battlefield.

In this collaboration between poet and painter, Derek Walcott, born and living in St Lucia, responds to each of 50 paintings by Peter Doig, the Scottish-born figurative artist now resident in Trinidad. Together, their works enter a dialogue on the Caribbean’s colonial legacy, home and the boundaries of art.

In this verse memoir Andrew Motion recalls the experiences that have influenced his life and art: his mother’s riding accident and lingering death, his widowed father’s dementia, and an unexpected meeting with an old love.

A successor to TS Eliot's Book of Practical Cats, this illustrated collection of poems introduces remarkable canine characters from Flo the philosophical foxhound to Dog Juan, the Lothario of north London.

Best known as a novelist, John Updike was also an accomplished poet. The 129 observations on life, love, art and science collected here are arranged chronologically to form a verse diary spanning his entire career and include such favourites as ‘Seagulls’ and 'Dog’s Death’. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Recorded in February 1980, in the garage of Larkin’s friend John Weeks, the two Sunday Sessions tapes contain 26 poems from four collections: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. The tapes were found in the garage in 2006 and are released on a vinyl LP recording, as befits Larkin’s love of records.

Based on the authors’ 2007 edition of the Pearl manuscript, this volume provides close, accurate translations of the ‘superb, but linguistically difficult’ medieval English poems Pearl, Cleanness Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. No jacket.

Born in Dublin, Walter Quin (d. 1640) was poet to the Stuart court and his poetry and prose (in English, Latin, French and Italian) includes works in support of James VI, along with historical and philosophical writing. This first edition of Quin’s work includes a biographical introduction and translations of his non-English texts.

From ‘A Medieval Schoolboy’s Complaint’ to Gillian Clarke’s ‘Catrin’, this collection of poems celebrates children, childhood and being a parent. The poems are arranged by ages, from infancy to schooldays – not forgetting childhood ailments in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Land of Counterpane’.

The 100 poems in this collection include work written in response to the Armistice of 1918, poems from earlier centuries and other conflicts, and specially commissioned works from modern writers including Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald and Jackie Kay.

First published in 1909, Apollinaire’s first book of poetry is here translated by XJ Kennedy, whose introductory essay, ‘A Natural History of the Poet’, describes this partly autobiographical work as containing ‘the genetic code’ of the later poetry. Recalling a medieval bestiary, the 30 short poems, in both French and English translation, are accompanied by 30 woodcuts by Raoul Dufy. American cut pages.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) is famous as the author of The Decameron, but his Latin Eclogues are relatively unknown. Engaging and charming in themselves, these bucolic poems also address political issues of their day and offer insights into life in Renaissance Italy. They are translated here, with an introduction, by the poet and critic David Slavitt.

In this volume from the Faber and Faber Poet-to-Poet series, Stephen Romer introduces his choice of poems by Robert Herrick (1591–1674). Most of the selections are from the Cavalier poet’s Hesperides (1648) with its wine, women and song, but there are some works from Noble Numbers, Herrick’s ‘pious pieces’.

Covering more than a hundred 19th-century American poets, arranged alphabetically from Henry Adams (1838–1918) to Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), the Encyclopedia comprises authoritative essays on the lives and writings of the poets, the provenance of their poetry, and its literary-historical and cultural significance.

'Once upon a time there were three little foxes Who didn’t wear stockings, and they didn’t wear sockses, But they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses, And they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.' The sheer fun of AA Milne’s poems, with their child’s view of the world and irresistible wordplay, has easily survived the century since they first appeared, while remaining evocative of British life in the 1920s. This book presents a selection from the two volumes of poetry on which Milne and his illustrator, EH Shepard collaborated: Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young.

From Heinrich Heine’s humorous ‘The Morning After’ to Louis de Berniere’s more intense ‘A Love Foretold’, this diverse anthology covers a wide range of sensual poetic expression. Predominantly by Western writers including John Donne, DH Lawrence and Carol Ann Duffy, the 45 works are complemented by erotic illustrations by artists such as Rodin, Klimt and Schiele. Sexually explicit.

An ideal introduction to the poetry of WB Yeats (1865–1939), this selection of 75 works, including the famous ‘Easter 1916' and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, traces the development of Yeats’s verse and demonstrates his interest in Irish folklore and national identity, the occult, and contemporary politics. Selected, with notes and extra material by the poet JG Nichols.

Introduced and selected by the award-winning novelist Andrew O’Hagan, this anthology of Burns’s verse is arranged around the topics of love, drink and politics, and includes favourites such as ‘A Red, Red Rose’, 'The Silver Tassie’ and ‘To a Mouse’.

Chosen by the poet himself and described by Michael Hofmann as ‘a gift to old and new readers alike’, this selection comprises five poems from each of twelve published collections, from his first, New Weather, released in 1973 when Muldoon was a student at Queens University, Belfast, to One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), which includes ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, in memory of his mentor, Seamus Heaney.

The great Persian poet Rumi (1207–73) was inspired by his eccentric spiritual guide Shams to compose these lyrical odes as metaphors for his love of God. Cowan’s translation presents 49 poems, with an introduction on the men’s deep friendship and their contribution to Islamic spirituality.

In this cultural history of the First World War, the conflict and the tremendous changes it wrought are seen from the perspective of poets and writers from all over Britain and Europe, including those who wrote propaganda or embraced the new violence, as well as more familiar 'war poets'.

Before his early death, Robert Fergusson (1750–74) created a substantial body of verse, and Burns acknowledged the influence of its humour, vigour and craft. This edition contains all his Scots poems and a selection of those in English, along with an introduction and notes.

Edinburgh’s brooding castle, steep slopes and far-reaching views have inspired poets for centuries. This thematically arranged collection celebrates the Scottish capital in the words of writers including Walter Scott and WE Henley. Robert Louis Stevenson explores the seamy side of ‘Auld Reekie’, William Dunbar excoriates its ‘stink of haddock’, while Liz Lochhead casts an ironic eye over its annual festival.

Since 1609, when they were first published, Shakespeare’s sonnets have fascinated readers, both with the depth of the poet’s insight into the variety of love and the passage of time and with the mysteries of the beautiful Young Man, the Rival Poet and the Dark Lady. This volume presents all 154 sonnets, with a brief introduction.

This selection of the finest works by the Lebanese-born American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) begins with the 26 fables of ‘The Prophet’ (1923), and presents seven more works in their entirety, including ‘Jesus, Son of Man’, ‘Sand and Foam’, and Gibran’s final prose poem, ‘The Earth Gods’.

Beginning with the songs and sonnets, this collection reflects the diversity of Donne’s poetry, ranging from the subtle argument to persuade his lover to stay in bed in ‘Break of Day’, to a selection of the divine poems on themes including the forgiveness of sin.

Celebrating the contributions to the English language made by 100 poets from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Ted Hughes and Mary Jo Salter, this collection introduces each one with a short biography and critical commentary. Every entry includes an excerpt which encapsulates the enduring nature of the writer’s work and how it has become integrated into everyday language.

This volume presents prose translations of 24 anonymous lays which complement the twelve well-known lays by Marie de France, the possible creator of the genre. This collection is somewhat wider in scope, with examples of magic and mystery stories, fun and games, and history as well as passion and romance.

Since fragments first appeared in journals and magazines in the 1970s, Silliman's long poem The Alphabet has intrigued and exasperated in equal measure. Presented in its entirety for the first time, this vast work consists of 26 smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet. Innovative in its language, this brilliant collage of artefacts, moments, episodes and voices captures the dizzying evolution of America's social and cultural consciousness.

Learning poetry by heart, Ana Sampson suggests, creates within yourself ‘a storehouse of the most beautiful and … useful words in the language’. For those wishing to build an ‘inner library’, she presents about 150 poems, organized by themes such as love, nature, faith and making merry, and ranging from the literary offerings of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wilfred Owen and John Betjeman to the nonsense verses of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.