Description
Poets have always drawn inspiration from the wild fancies of dream life. We spend a third of our lives asleep, and throughout history our nocturnal visions have engaged the interpretive talents of our greatest writers.
This treasury of poets–Sidney, Donne, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Plath, Graves, Roethke, Bishop, Moore, Updike, and many more–encompasses lullabies, invocations, aubades, songs, epigrams, and stories, in every conceivable mood from the broadly comic to the tragic. It includes poems about daydreams and nightmares, about falling asleep and about waking up, about insomnia, night thoughts, monsters of the dark, twilight, dawn, and the rebirth of morning. From Auden’s “Lullaby” to Rossetti’s “Nuptial Sleep,” from Salvatore Quasimodo’s “Insomnia” to Thom Gunn’s “Annihilation of Nothing,” Poems of Sleep and Dreams evokes the whole haunting, magical spectrum of sleep and dream.
Read more
Alan W. Burnside –
I found this invaluable as it introduced me to poets and poems that I would not otherwise have come across, ranging from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Very enjoyable and informative.
Mushkie –
I bought this book after thoroughly enjoying the Everyman collection, On the Wings of Song. I was disappointed in the selection of poems in this anthology, which I found skewed to works by European men of the past centuries. While I enjoy all poetry from all times, I felt there could have been a better balance in the selection of poems.
Bookfriend –
Perhaps I expected too much – but frankly this book is headed for the Charity shop, where possibly it may come into the hands of someone who will appreciate it better – ?
I can only say I found it boring, and rather than relaxing my mind did the opposite! Perhaps these works were written by those stunned by sleeplessness themselves, for many make little sense, and I usually enjoy working out the mysteries of symbolism.
I am pleased for the first reviewer, though – at least someone found something to value in it.