Every work,
annotated.
You get the whole passage, in its own words, plus a note in the margin that explains what it's doing. Nothing is abridged.
See which of these became films →Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
A broken statue, a desert, and the longest-lasting boast in English.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
William Shakespeare · 1609
The love poem that quietly promises to outlive every summer.
Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll · 1871
A poem made almost entirely of invented words — and you still follow it.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1816
A poem Coleridge claimed he dreamed, and then lost.
She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron · 1815
The most carefully balanced compliment ever paid in English verse.
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Keats tries to leave his own body, and nearly manages it.
Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
William Shakespeare · 1609
The anti-love poem that ends up the most honest love poem in English.
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift · 1729
The most savage joke in English, delivered in the calmest voice.
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope · 1712
An epic about a stolen curl of hair, which is the entire point.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth · 1802
London at dawn, seen as though nobody had ever looked at it before.
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning · 1842
A monologue in which the speaker condemns himself while being perfectly polite.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams · 1923
Sixteen words that ask what a poem is allowed to be about.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
A portrait ages so that its subject does not.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
Four lovers, six actors, one forest, and a very petty fairy king.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare · 1611
A magician on an island stages a shipwreck for his enemies.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927
A summer house, a postponed trip, and ten years passing in a bracket.
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · 1910
An opera house with a fifth cellar and a tenant nobody has seen.