Jon Stallworthy – författare

Love itself might be blind, but over millennia it has inspired some of the most perceptive and visionary poetry ever written. From the fragments of Sappho, to the sonnets of Shakespeare and the Romantic verses of Byron, Keats and Shelley, right through to Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy, The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry collates and curates the very finest poems on this subject from across cultures and ages. Whether it's the burning passion of two young lovers, the steady companionship of a married couple, the unconditional love of a parent for a child or the enduring affection of lifelong friendship, this is Penguin's definitive collection of the most treasured writing on the most universal of themes.

This new selection brings together the poetry of three of the most distinctive and moving voices to emerge from the First World War. Here are the controlled passion and rich metaphors of Wilfred Owen's celebrated verses such as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Strange Meeting', along with many of his lesser-known works. The elegiac poems of Ivor Gurney, including 'Requiem' and 'The Silent One', reflect his love of language, music and landscape, while the visceral works of Isaac Rosenberg, such as 'Break of Day in the Trenches', are filled with stark imagery but also, as in 'Louse Hunting', with vitality and humour. Each poet reflects the disparate experiences of ordinary soldiers in war, and attempts to capture man's humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances.

From the civilization of the Lower Nile to that of the Lower Hudson, more poets have written more convincingly, more poignantly about love than about any other subject. Jon Stallworthy has here selected some of the most moving, funny, shameless, and erotic love poems in the English language. Representing the work of more than 190 poets, from Sappho to Byron and Browning, from Rossetti to Wordsworth and E.E. Cummings, he offers a startling collection of love poetry down through the ages. Arranged thematically, beginning with the first drawings of young love and ending with the "long look back" of the aged, and revealing love in all its different aspects and perversities, this anthology demonstrates vividly man's changeless responses to the changing seasons of the heart. "Stallworthy's book of love poetry, ranging across more than twenty centuries of writing about love 'till the stars have run away' establishes beyond the eye-shadow of a doubt that love is, has been and always will be blind."--Christian Science Monitor "A very thorough job...eccentric and entertaining."--Times Literary Supplement (London)

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction and additional poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction additonal poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Of all the work bequeathed by to us by that generation of young men who fought in the trenches, Owen's is the most remarkable for its breadth of sympathy and its understanding of human suffering and tenderness, at home and on the battlefield.This new, authoritative edition, indispensable to student and general reader alike, contains the texts of 103 poems and twelve fragments, among them thirty-three poems not previously published or otherwise available in paperback edition. Many of the most famous have important new readings; illuminating notes and a detailed biographical table are also included.

This volume, Stallworthy's seventh collection, typifies the way in which his best work mingles a graphically personal element with a strong sense of responsibility. "The fullest, most representative collection of his verse now available".--Library Journal.

The Guest from the Future is a selection of poetry by one of the Norton college department's most redoubtable editors, Professor Jon Stallworthy of Oxford University.

From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors' Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.

From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors' Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet.

T S Eliot called Louis MacNeice 'a poet of genius', a poet's poet, one 'whose virtuosity can be fully appreciated only by other poets'. As his publisher, however, Eliot knew that MacNeice's work could speak to a much larger public. His Autumn Journal, published in May 1939, went through five printings during the war years, and it was to become one of the definitive poems of the 1930s.'I would have a poet,' wrote MacNeice, 'able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.' Knowing himself to be all of those things, modesty and a desire to demystify his calling led him to make no mention of the one all-important characteristic that distinguishes a poet: a mastery of the music and magic of language.MacNeice's mother died when he was seven, and Jon Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems. Drawing on the testimony of MacNeice's family, friends and lovers, and his extensive correspondence, Stallworthy has produced a remarkable portrait of a poet of rare energy and integrity who was also a brilliant scholar, critic, autobiographer, playwright and translator.'Jon Stallworthy's Louis MacNeice is the indispensable guide to the poetry and is written with great verve, generosity and brilliance. A moving and eloquent account of the life of the poet, as well as a superb analysis of the relationship between the life and the work, this is surely one of the great literary biographies of our time.'Jonathan Allison, editor of The Selected Letters of Louis MacNeice

No poetry has touched readers' hearts more deeply than the soldier poets of the First World War. Published to commemorate the centenary of 1914, this stunning set of books, with specially commissioned covers by leading print makers, is an essential gathering of our most beloved war poets introduced by leading poets and biographers of our present day.Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet.

'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction.When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.

WITH A FOREWORD BY FRANK KERMODEHenry Reed (1914-86) is most familiar as the author of 'The Naming of Parts', the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing A Map of Verona, his 1946 collection, he was a fine translator, particularly from the Italian, and wrote acclaimed radio plays, including an ambitious adaptation of Moby-Dick and a series of six plays featuring his comic creation Hilda Tablet. On his death he left a sheaf of uncollected poems that had appeared in magazines or were in manuscript. These, together with all Reed's published work, a group of translations and a selection of songs from the radio plays, make up this Collected Poems. Jon Stallworthy, poet, critic and biographer of Wilfred Owen, has included a biographical and critical introduction to this profound, witty and humane poet.Cover image 'Troops Resting' (detail) by Edward Ardizzone. Crown copyright, reproduced by permission of the Imperial War Museum.