Songs at the Start

Guiney, Louise Imogen, 1861-1920Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.3

Word count: 51K words
Chapters: 6

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.Songs at the Start by Louise Imogen GuineyAuthor: Guiney, Louise Imogen, 1861-1920,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Sep 19, 2016

Editor's review

This poetry collection comes from the American poet Louise Imogen Guiney, an early gathering of her lyric verse, released free by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain ebook. Guiney's style is lucid and restrained, often drawing on New England nature, classical imagery, and religious feeling; her language is attentive to sound, rewarding slow and careful reading. As a late-19th-century American poetry work, it lets readers sense the lingering resonance of the late Victorian lyric tradition and offers primary texts for the study of American women's poetry. The electronic edition is easy to search and excerpt, suited to reciting in fragmented moments such as commutes or before sleep, and useful as supplementary reading for poetry translation and English literature courses. Note that the book is in the original English and bears clear marks of its era in subject and language; readers should appreciate its beauty of rhythm and imagery with a sense of historical context.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Lovers of 19th-century British and American lyric poetry willing to read the original slowly
English literature students needing texts by American women poets
Translation trainees and reciters seeking public-domain English poetry
Readers interested in late Victorian literature and the religious lyric tradition

Not a good fit for

General readers seeking a Chinese translation or bilingual edition
Readers who prefer modern poetry, strong narrative, or tightly plotted works

Reading tips

Read through the table of contents first, choosing poems with vivid natural imagery in their titles for first recitation
Read each poem twice: first for sound and rhythm, second with notes for allusions
Keep a notebook of favorite images and sentence patterns for translation or imitation
Use background material on late-19th-century American literature to understand the religious and local feeling in the poems

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 there a Chinese translation of this book?

According to the available information, the book is an English public-domain ebook released by Project Gutenberg; the language is English, and no Chinese translation is mentioned. Readers who need a Chinese version should look for other publication information.

Is it suitable for readers with no poetry background at all?

It can be read, but the threshold is fairly high. The poems contain many allusions and 19th-century English expressions; beginners should use notes or introductory guides and a dictionary to understand them line by line, rather than expecting to grasp everything at once.

Why are the author's birth and death years listed?

Guiney was born in 1861 and died in 1920; her works have entered the public domain, on which basis Project Gutenberg releases them free. The dates also help readers place her writing in its historical context.

Comments

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About the author

Guiney, Louise Imogen, 1861-1920 Author

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) was an author known for both poetry and prose, with fifteen works held in this collection. Public information about her life is limited, and biographical details are difficult to verify, but the surviving titles show her interests spanning poetry, biographical portraits, and short stories. Poetry collections such as The White Sail, and Other Poems, Songs at the Start, and England and Yesterday: A Book of Short Poems display a compressed, restrained style steeped in classical and religious feeling. Her biographical works, Blessed Edmund Campion and Robert Emmet: A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance, reveal a sustained attention to Catholic martyrs and Irish historical figures. Lovers' Saint Ruth's, and Three Other Tales and Brownies and Bogles further show her experiments in short narrative and folklore. Overall, her writing combines literary craft with a sense of history and should appeal to readers interested in late nineteenth-century English poetry and biography.