Recommendations?

[JordanW]

I've been checking out some stuff on this website and I've found a lot of interesting readings that I'm very thankful that I've found. I am just looking for some recommended books from you guys, to check out. I really want to Edgar Allan Poe stuff and William Blake. I ordered 2 Plato books that I'm excited about, I'd like to check out some more Philosophy stuff as well as stuff by the 2 Authors that I mentioned above. Any recommendations from them and other people? Thanks for any responses.

[stlukesguild]

William Blake- Get his Collected Poems... he is one of the giants. You probably want to start with the Songs of Innocence and Experience, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the uncollected shorter poems (from the Rossetti and Pickering manuscripts)... but don't overlook long poems, especially Milton and Jerusalem. Also check out Blake's visual art. I would especially recommend the Dover edition of his Book of Job... but there are any number of books on his paintings and prints out there.

Poe? Short stories and selected poetry. If you like Poe's work check out the short stories by Theophile Gautier, Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, J.S. LeFanu, etc... I would also highly recommend Kafka and J.L. Borges as more contemporary writers having come out of this tradition. If you like Poe's poetry, you'll outgrow it... Just kidding... but check out Shelley (whom Poe is deeply indebted to) as well as Gautier and Baudelaire (who certainly owe Poe).

[JBI]

Blake is hard to read if you have only read Songs of Innocence and Experience. I found, even when I thought I understood his prophetic books, that in fact I was completely wrong on many accounts. It took a deep reading of Frye's Fearful Symmetry, and post-Frye criticism to finally start to understand the stuff.

If you are into Gothic works, which is what Poe was trying to do I believe, perhaps try some of Victor Hugo's work. Not sure if you were more interested in Poe's poetry, or his prose though. His poetry, if you are interested stems from Coleridge and Shelley (mostly Shelley) but if you are interested in the Gothic genre as a whole, you should read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey, as it has been said, Hawthorne, especially his selected short stories, and of course Thoreau, especially his poetry. Seriously though, if you really want to read and understand these works, a read of the big 6 romantics (that includes Blake) is in order.

[JordanW]

Thanks guys for the responses. :) So pretty much anything by either writer is going to be good? :p What other writer's would you recommend that aren't necessarily similar to them?

Here's something from my Introduction thread where someone wanted me to explain what I really was interested in, so here you go:



I am really looking to start with some stuff from William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe, and also anyone that is similar to them? I'm pretty much open to anything I guess, I'm really looking for more classical stuff (anything B.C. to the mid to late 1800's.) I also want to learn about Greek Philosophy, and I ordered 2 books today, one being Plato's The Republic and the other being Plato's The 5 Dialogues, both of which I am very excited to read. I always enjoyed reading when I was a kid, but I kind of fell away from that when I got older and when high school DEMANDED you to read, it kind of turned me away from reading. Now I am out of high school though and am actually interested in reading, so I hope that this post gives you enough information on what you need, if not feel free to ask me more. Thanks.

I'm also thinking about some Shakespeare, but which of all these different translations would I want to get? For example, I'll show you Romeo & Juliet.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=romeo+and+juliet

[johann cruyff]

I'm also thinking about some Shakespeare, but which of all these different translations would I want to get? For example, I'll show you Romeo & Juliet.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=romeo+and+juliet

Umm...I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious,but...you're looking for Shakespeare translations?

[JordanW]

Umm...I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious,but...you're looking for Shakespeare translations?
Well what I'm saying is which book company do I want to purchase it from? Isn't there a difference among the different book companies that publish his works?

[stlukesguild]

My God! Shakespeare is so central to Western and especially English-language lit that there are endless quality editions. For a complete Shakespeare I'd recommend one of those editions from a respectable academic press: Oxford, Yale, Princeton, etc... or perhaps one of the quality publishers of great literature: Modern Library, etc... If you can handle the Bard without lots of glosses, commentaries, etc... your best bet for beginning might be to check out Dover Book's grossly inexpensive but quality paperback editions:

http://store.doverpublications.com/index.html

(Just enter "Shakespeare" or the name of one of the plays)

Beyond... before Romeo and Juliet I would greatly recommend Othello, MacBeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummers Night Dream, The Collected Sonnets, etc...

[JBI]

I believe there is an Arden edition of the complete works which is said to be the best scholarly edition.

edit, here is a link to the amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Arden-Shakespeare-Complete-Works/dp/1903436613/ref=pd_bbs_sr_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213334012&sr=8-7

According to the comments, there are no footnotes in the book, therefore one needs to flip to the glossary, and use a dictionary where needed. I am sure however, that when it comes to editing through quarto and folio texts, that this edition has done a superb job at rendering the highest quality Shakespeare.

There are many editions of these works, like StLukes said, the Oxford is a very popular choice, as is the Arden. One must decide how much they wish to spend on the work, and whether they want hardback or paperback. It is rather difficult to get a good hardback edition of the complete works without spending an arm and a leg, but individual plays, such as the ones mentioned, and his major comedies and romances are worth buying in hardback, as, if you are serious about Shakespeare, you will be flipping through that book more than once.

[JordanW]

So the Oxford classics is a good series? What about the Folger's one?

[sofia82]

I've been reading The Riverside Shakespeare (Houghton Mifflin), which is complete collection of Shakespeare's plays and poetry with notes.

[stlukesguild]

If you are serious about reading the classics outside of a structured formal course, I would greatly recommend you look into some critical writings on the "canon" or "must-read" list of Western literature. I would greatly recommend harold Bloom's Western Canon and Genius, David Denby's Great Books, Fadiman and Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan, but there are many others. For some recommendations you might check here:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html#west

(The links connect to various lists of "great books")

My personal recommendations would include:

The Bible- King James Translation
Homer The Iliad and the Odyssey- (Robert Fitzgerald, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Fagles are all good translations)
Aeschylus- The Orestia (Robert Fagles)
Sophocles- The Oedipus Plays (Robert Fagles)
Euripides-Alcestis, Medea, The Bachae (Paul Roche tr.)
Aristophanes- Collected Plays (Paul Roche)
Plato- The Republic (Allen Bloom tr.)
Virgil- The Aeneid (Fagles)
Ovid- Metamorphoses (Mandelbaum tr.)
Horace- Odes (Burton Raffel and/or David Ferry... and there is also a Penguin edition of "Horace in English" that offers translations by any number of great British poets)
Dante- The Divine Comedy (John Ciardi, Mark Musa, Allen Mandelbaum, even Longfellow all offer solid translations... )
Petrarch- Canzoniere (sonnets) (Mark Musa and/or David Young tr.)
Boccaccio- The Decammeron (you can always talk to Petrarch's Love who is the resident expert in this field, but G.H. McWilliam seems to be the most complete English standard)
The Qur'ran- (Ahmed Ali tr.)
Beowulf- (Seamus Heaney or Burton Raffel tr.)
Chaucer- Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English... no translations in "modern English" admitted!)
Shakespeare- (see above)
John Donne- Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Modern Library ed.)
Edmund Spencer- The Faerie Queene, Sonnets, Epithalimion, Muiopotmos
Milton- Paradise Lost
Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel (Modern Library uses the Urquhart/Le Motteux which is nearly contemporary with Rabelais. The version is very free but recommended as quite a literary achievement in its own right. Beyond this the Burton Raffel and Donald Frame translations are recommended)
For more of early French poets such as Ronsard I would recommend Dead French Poets Speak Plain English with the acclaimed translations by Kendall Lappin
Montaigne-Essays- (Donald Frame)
Sir Francis Bacon- Essays
Cervantes- Don Quixote (Edith Grossman tr.)
Moliere- Plays (tr. by Richard Wilbur and Donald Frame)
Swift- Gulliver's Travels
DeFoe- Robinson Caruso
Sterne-Tristam Shandy
Rousseau- Confessions
Voltaire- Candide
Goethe- The Sorrows of Young Werther (Bogan and Mayer tr. Everyman's ed.)
Goethe- Faust pt. I and II (Stuart Atkins, Martin Greenberg, Barker Fairley, Walter Arndt... none is perfect...)
Goethe- Italian Journey (Auden tr. Everyman's ed.)
Goethe- Selected Poems (Christopher Middleton, Michael Hamburger, Longfellow, John Whaley, etc... recommended... a decent selection in the Everyman's ed.)
Novalis- Hymns to the Night
Holderlin- Poems (tr. Christopher Middleton, Richard Sieburth, and Michael Hamburger... especially the last)
William Blake- Collected Poems and Prose
Shelley- Collected Poetry
Byron- Don Juan and Selected Poems
Wordsworth- Selected Poetry, The Prelude
Coleridge- Selected Poems
Keats- Collected Poems
Tennyson- Selected Poems
Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
Victor Hugo- Selected Poetry (Blackmore tr.)
Zola- Nana
Flaubert- Madame Bovary (Steegmuller tr.)
Balzac- Lost Illusions
Theophile Gautier- Collected Tales, Poems
Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil (Richard Howard tr. or New Directions ed.)
Verlaine- Selected Poems
Rimbaud- Illuminations, A Season in Hell (Louise Varese tr.)
Mallarme- Selected Poems
Tolstoy- War and Peace/Anna Karenina
Dostoevski- The Brothers Karamazov
Checkov- Selected Short Stories
Guy de Maupassant- Selected Stories
Hawthorne- Selected Tales
Whitman- Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- Selected Poems
Emerson- Essays
Melville- Moby Dick
Dickens- David Copperfiled, A Tale of two Cities
Robert Louis Stevenson- Selected Short Stories
Walter Pater- The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde- The Importance of Being Earnest
Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Thomas Hardy- Selected Poems
Henry James- Selected Short Stories (Turn of the Screw)
Conrad- Heart of Darkness
Yeats- Selected Poems
Rilke- The New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, Uncollected Poems (tr. Snow)
Kafka- Collected Short Stories, The Trial
Hesse- Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game
Mann- A Death in Venice, Doktor Faustus, Magic Mountain
Hemingway- Collected Short Stories
Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland
Proust- In Search of Lost Time
Stendal- The Scarlet and the Black
Gogol- The Collected Tales (Volokhonsky tr.)
Mandelstam, Ahkmontova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak- Selected Poems
James Joyce- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Hart Crane- Collected Poems
Wallace Stevens- Collected Poems
Robert Frost- Collected Poems

This should give you a start toward the early 20th century... although you understand it just scrapes the surface and leaves out a hell of a lot of great books. I also haven't even touched upon Eastern literature: Firdawsi, Hafez, Tu Fu, Li Po, etc... Enjoy!;)

[JordanW]

Hey thanks a lot! So is this stuff from B.C. to the mid-late 1800's? This is what I'm mainly looking for. I want some Poe and Blake stuff as well.

[Pecksie]

Hi Jordan,

If you're going to read Shakespeare, you might enjoy a little context. Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The invention of the human" is a wonderful companion to the plays.

I see you've mentioned Poe. Once you've read his horror stories, I suggest you move on to Henry James's "The turn of the screw" (scary!) and Horacio Quiroga's creepy short stories (there's a volume called, I think, "The decapitated chicken and other stories").

[JBI]

Hey thanks a lot! So is this stuff from B.C. to the mid-late 1800's? This is what I'm mainly looking for. I want some Poe and Blake stuff as well.

Its almost impossible to read Blake without reading Milton and the Bible (well to understand them as intended anyway). You'll find if you keep persisting with Blake, that not knowing what the work is playing off of, you will not understand what is going on. (specifically in the later prophetic works). To be honest, without reading from the top of the canon, the major early authors, it is very difficult to understand anything up until 1850 or so. Even after that a knowledge of the earlier canon, at least the major players, will make reading far more accessible than without it. It is almost essential that you read the Greeks, a few of the Romans, and the Christian Bible (that is, the Judaic Portions, the Christian portions, and the apocrypha) to touch poetry at all. Do not discriminate thinking newer is better. Thanks to modern translations (which try to mimic the words of the masters in modern idiom) Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Ovid, etc. all become quite accessible and extremely enjoyable. To limit yourself based on time period is a great mistake.

[mjga]

So the Oxford classics is a good series? What about the Folger's one?


Folger's will be easy to find - especially at big box book stores. We use Folger's at the high school I teach at and I find them to be decent. There are nice summaries at the beginning of each scene and a lot of vocabulary is explained.

[EricP]

If you are interested in Poe, you may like the book I'm reading at the moment: "Intimate Journals" by Charles Baudelaire. This is the description on the back cover of the book:

"Edgar Allen Poe suggested that any man who dared write a book with complete frankness would produce a masterpiece. Baudelaire began such a book--'My Heart Laid Bare', a passionately honest investigation of his secret thoughts and inclinations. That text, along with other fragments, literary notes, aphorisms, drafts of prose poems, and brilliant observations on politics, personalities, morals, and fashions, makes up these 'Intimate Journals.'"