Poems

Tree, Iris, 1897-1968Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.6

Word count: 115K words
Chapters: 12

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Poems by Iris TreeAuthor: Tree, Iris, 1897-1968,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: May 14, 2014

Editor's review

This poetry collection comes from the twentieth-century English poet Iris Tree; the Project Gutenberg edition offers a free English electronic text. Her poems are mostly short and compressed, dense with imagery, and often circle around love, time, city life, and personal feeling. The tone falls between the lyrical and the coldly restrained, carrying the spareness of early modernist poetry. For Chinese readers its value lies not in grand narrative but in offering an exercise in close reading: the sentences are not long, yet they often leave gaps at the turns of imagery, making the book suited to slow reading poem by poem and to repeated pondering of tone and rhythm. It can serve as a supplementary anthology for beginners in English poetry and is also suitable for comparative reading alongside works by women poets of the same period. Note that the Gutenberg edition provides only the original text, with no translation notes or background introduction; readers must supply information on the author and the era themselves in order to grasp the allusions and context in the poems more accurately.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in twentieth-century English poetry who are willing to read the original text
Learners who wish to practice close reading and language sense in English through short poems
Literature enthusiasts interested in women poets' writing who want to broaden their range of anthologies
English teachers who need classroom selections and are looking for short poetic texts

Not a good fit for

Beginner readers hoping for systematic translation notes and detailed background introductions
General readers who prefer long narrative or plot-driven works
Specialist researchers who need a complete poet's collected works or an authoritative critical edition

Reading tips

Read only two or three poems each time: first read one aloud to feel the rhythm, then go back to the echoes between key words and images.
Keep a sheet of paper to record recurring words and emotional threads; after finishing the book, look back at how these threads change.
When you meet a difficult poem, skip it first; after finishing the whole book, return and reread it, and you can often understand its tone with the help of the other poems.
You may choose a few poems and try translating a sentence or two yourself, comparing how different translations affect rhythm and meaning.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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.

FAQ

Is this poetry collection suitable for readers with zero background in English poetry?

It can serve as a supplementary anthology, but it is not the most ideal first book for beginners. The poems are short and the language is not especially difficult, yet the book lacks notes and an introduction, so beginners may easily remain at the literal level. It is better to read an introductory anthology with translation notes first and then come to this original text.

What themes are mainly written about in the poetry collection?

From the visible text, the poems mostly revolve around love, time, the city, and personal feeling; they are short in length, concentrated in imagery, and restrained in tone. The themes of specific poems should be based on the original text; readers may summarize them after reading through, and should not presuppose a single overarching theme.

Does the Gutenberg edition have notes or a translator's statement?

The Gutenberg edition usually provides only the original text of the work and basic bibliographic information, without translation notes, an author chronology, or an introduction to the work. If readers need to understand the allusions and historical background in the poems, they must separately consult biographies of the poet, literary history materials, or annotated print editions.

Can it be used as poetry reading material for English classes?

Yes. The poems are short, making it convenient to complete close reading and discussion within class, and they are also suitable for arranging reading aloud and imitation writing exercises. Teachers need to supply the author's background and necessary language notes themselves, and should pay attention to whether the difficulty and themes of the selected poems suit the students' ages.

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About the author

Tree, Iris, 1897-1968 Author · British · 1897–1968

Iris Tree (1897–1968) was an English poet and actress, and the daughter of the playwright Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Raised in a highly artistic family, she took to the stage early in life while also making her mark on the twentieth-century English literary scene as a poet. Her representative work, Poems, brings together the essence of her poetic style: delicate and sensuous, drawing on personal feeling, natural imagery and the experience of city life, with concise language and a slow, measured rhythm that carries echoes of aestheticism and romanticism. Public information on the details of her life—her education, her specific stage career and the chronology of her writing—is limited, and scholarly attention to her poetry has been relatively sparse. Even so, as a woman creator who moved between performance and literature, she offers a sidelong view of the British artistic circles of the early twentieth century. The collection currently holds one work by her, Poems.