FREE: Poetry Books: Dylan Thomas & Langston Hughes

The listing, Poetry Books: Dylan Thomas & Langston Hughes has ended.

Dylan Thomas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
First the young schoolboy, gloriously immersed in make-believe in a shabby farmyard; then the budding poet with his thrilling friendships and dreams of fortune. Finally, the neophyte reporter roaming suburban Swansea for momentous material. In ten wonderfully evocative short stories, Dylan Thomas conveys the exuberance and enthusiasm of youth as he fictionalises events from his childhood. Adolescent sexuality and male friendship are two of the themes that pervade this collection, along with the more familiar topics of love, death and religion.

Langston Hughes: Selected Poems
With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."

The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.