ESNTL SHAKESP (Essential Poets) - Softcover

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.

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.