Richard Cory

"Richard Cory" is a narrative poem written by Edwin Arlington Robinson. It was first published in 1897, as part of The Children of the Night, having been completed in July of that year; and it remains one of Robinson's most popular and anthologized poems. The poem describes a person who is wealthy, well educated, mannerly, and admired by the people in his town. Despite all this, he fatally shoots himself in the head.

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

"Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a twelve-line poem composed of three quatrains written by William Butler Yeats in 1888 and first published in the National Observer in 1890. It was reprinted in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics in 1892 and as an illustrated Cuala Press Broadside in 1932.

Leda and the Swan

Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In the W. B. Yeats version, it is subtly suggested that Clytemnestra, although being the daughter of Tyndareus, has somehow been traumatized by what the swan has done to her mother.

Bartleby

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. A Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copy and any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to".

The Revolutionary Period

The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen Colonies maintained by force of arms their refusal to submit to the authority of the King and Parliament of Great Britain, and founded the independent United States.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume", he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it".

Paul Revere’s Ride

"Paul Revere's Ride" (1860) is a poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that commemorates the actions of American patriot Paul Revere on April 18, 1775, although with significant inaccuracies. It was first published in the January 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It was later retitled "The Landlord's Tale" in the collection Tales of a Wayside Inn.