A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature--selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times

"[A] fizzing, exhilarating book." -- Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times, London

"Delightful.'" -- New York Times Book Review

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work -- over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not.

John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place.

For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world's poems -- and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

• We started tracking this book on May 16, 2020.
• This book was £6.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 32 times in the past 1,578 days.
• The current price of this book is £8.99 last checked 21 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £8.07.
• The lowest price to date was £5.69 last reached on April 2, 2021.
• This book has been £5.69 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £10.79 last reached on February 3, 2021.
• This book has been £10.79 2 times since we started tracking it.

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 321 Pages
• File Size: 2,840 KB