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 →The Tyger
William Blake · 1794
Six burning questions about who could possibly build something so fierce.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
Ten thousand daffodils, and the memory that keeps on paying out.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1816
A poem Coleridge claimed he dreamed, and then lost.
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Keats tries to leave his own body, and nearly manages it.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth · 1802
London at dawn, seen as though nobody had ever looked at it before.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
William Wordsworth · 1798
Returning to a place to find that the person who first saw it has gone.
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
A poet asking the weather to use him as an instrument.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
The simplest promise in English poetry, and the longest one.
Moby-Dick — Opening
Herman Melville · 1851
Three words that turn a narrator into an invitation.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams · 1923
Sixteen words that ask what a poem is allowed to be about.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
Two houses, one moor, and a love that refuses to stay buried.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
A country girl destroyed by other people's definitions of purity.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
A woman inherits a farm and three very different kinds of love.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
Four lovers, six actors, one forest, and a very petty fairy king.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
Boys on an island discover what they have already been taught.
Dune
Frank Herbert · 1965
A desert planet, a spice, and a prophecy engineered by people who profit from it.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954
A small person carries the one thing nobody powerful can be trusted with.