Classic Poetry

“A bee may be born in a hole in a tree, but she likes the honey of the lotus.” Shakuntala, a timeless masterpiece by the ancient Indian poet Kalidasa, weaves a poignant tale of love, longing and destiny. Centred around the enchanting Shakuntala, t...

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title given by Edward FitzGerald to his translation of a selection of quatrains, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), a Persian poet, mathematician an...

“But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.” Composed in the 8th century BCE, Homer's The Odyssey narrates the arduous journey of Odysseus, the ...

Milton’s magnum opus, Paradise Lost, an epic poem in blank verse, was composed during the period 1658 to 1664. The first version, published in 1667, comprised ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. The second edition published in 1674 is...

The initial fame of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 was due to Gitanjali which was published from London in 1912, although Tagore had published another Gītānjali in Bengali in 1910. Deeply rooted...

The Prophet (1923) is a book of 26 prose poems by the Lebanese American artist, philosopher and writer Khalil Gibran. A collection of philosophical, spiritual and motivational poetic essays, it reflects Gibran's experience as an immigrant. The tex...

Homer's The Iliad, an ancient epic of unparalleled significance, transports readers to the heart of the Trojan War, an epoch-defining conflict between gods and mortals. With eloquence and poetic prowess, Homer weaves a tapestry of heroism, tragedy...

James Joyce’s Ulysses, a landmark of modernist literature, takes place over a single day—16 June 1904—in Dublin, as Leopold Bloom journeys through the city. Drawing structural inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce reimagines classical figures in...