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.
To be, or not to be
William Shakespeare · Hamlet · 1601
The most famous think-out-loud in the language, plainly translated.
Beowulf
Anonymous · c. 700–1000
Where English literature starts: a hall, a monster, and a poem built on alliteration.
No Man Is an Island
John Donne · 1624
The sentence that gave Hemingway a title and everyone else a funeral reading.
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Keats tries to leave his own body, and nearly manages it.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
The poem engineered, beat by beat, to get inside your head.
All the world's a stage
William Shakespeare · As You Like It · 1599
Seven ages of man, from the play's most cheerfully depressed courtier.
Death, be not proud
John Donne · 1633
A sonnet that argues with death and wins on a technicality.
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
A seduction argument built like a syllogism, with a graveyard in the middle.
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
A poet asking the weather to use him as an instrument.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats · 1819
A ballad with one question, one answer, and no cure.
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1842
An old hero refusing the only thing left to him: rest.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · c. 1863
Death as a courteous driver, and eternity as a roof.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen · 1917
The Latin tag that patriotic poetry loved, taken apart in a gas attack.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
Two houses, one moor, and a love that refuses to stay buried.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
A portrait ages so that its subject does not.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
One affair, one marriage, and a society that grants forgiveness unevenly.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BC
The last weeks of a siege, and the rage of one man inside it.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife, written with the poet's enemies in the right places.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck · 1937
Two migrant workers and a farm they will never own.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954
A small person carries the one thing nobody powerful can be trusted with.
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe · 1842
A prince locks the plague out and holds a party in colour-coded rooms.