Forty-Two Poems
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Poetry lovers who enjoy English lyric poetry and are willing to read closely poem by poem
- Translation learners doing English poetry translation practice who need short sample texts
- Readers interested in how Oriental subjects and classical imagery appear in English poetry
- English learners who want a short poetry collection as daily reading-aloud material
Not a good fit for
- Beginning poetry readers who need detailed notes and background introductions
- General readers who prefer strongly narrative works with complete plots
- Fast readers impatient with archaic diction and elaborate sound patterns
Reading tips
- Read one poem closely each day: first read it aloud to feel the rhythm, then look up unfamiliar words and allusions, and finally write two or three sentences of response.
- Select several poems with similar imagery for comparative reading and observe how diction and structure change under the same theme.
- Try translating one of the poems into Chinese, then compare it with your own literal translation to experience the trade-offs between sound and meaning.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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- 6
FAQ
Is this poetry collection suitable for English beginners?
Does the electronic text have notes or an introduction?
Is there a unified thematic thread among the forty-two poems?
Comments
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About the author
James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) was a British poet, playwright and novelist, born in Lewisham, London, and educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and Caius College, Cambridge. From 1910 he served in the British consular service, posted to Constantinople, Smyrna and Beirut, and these foreign experiences deeply shaped his writing. His poetry collections Forty-Two Poems and The Golden Journey to Samarkand show the influence of the Parnassian school in their attention to form and imagery, while his verse play Hassan, set in Baghdad, is rich in Oriental colour. He also wrote the novels The King of Alsander and The Last Generation. He died of tuberculosis in Davos, Switzerland, in 1915, at the age of thirty.
