Secondhand Drama & Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2612

Secondhand Drama & Poetry Bargain Book Box SP2612

Twenty-one books bringing together the best of English-language drama and poetry in a single collection — seven Penguin Plays volumes covering the new English dramatists of the 1950s and 60s alongside three European classics, and then Penguin Classics spanning Greek tragedy, medieval epic, and Tang dynasty verse. The poetry runs from Burns and Donne through Coleridge and Yeats to A. Alvarez's landmark New Poetry anthology, with three volumes of Penguin Modern Poets — including the electrifying Mersey Sound — giving the box some welcome contemporary energy. A collection that takes the whole tradition seriously, from Aeschylus to Adrian Henri.

1. Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems — ed. Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Peter Pierce — A landmark anthology gathering over a hundred Australian poets who wrote about Gallipoli, the Western Front, the Second World War, and Vietnam — an essential document of both Australian literary history and the country's long, complicated relationship with armed conflict.
2. Frontier of Going: An Anthology of Space Poetry — ed. John Fairfax — A remarkable Panther anthology gathering poetry that responds to space, the cosmos, and the technological imagination — a genre-crossing collection that predates most serious discussion of science fiction as a legitimate literary territory.
3. Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound — Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten — The most famous volume in the Penguin Modern Poets series, and one of the bestselling poetry collections of the twentieth century — funny, accessible, urban, and alive in ways that changed what British poetry was allowed to be.
4. Penguin Modern Poets — Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth — Clemo's mystical Cornish imagery, Lucie-Smith's precise urban observation, and MacBeth's dark theatrical wit make this one of the most varied and stimulating volumes in the series.
5. Penguin Modern Poets — Christopher Middleton, David Wevill — A volume from the early years of the series bringing together poets whose work in the 1960s combined formal intelligence with a new directness of perception — an excellent introduction to a formative decade in British verse.
6. The New Poetry — A. Alvarez — Alvarez's landmark Penguin anthology, first published in 1962, that introduced a generation of readers to Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the post-Movement poets — one of the most influential poetry anthologies of the twentieth century.
7. Robert Burns: Twenty Favourite Songs and Poems — A pocket selection of Scotland's national poet gathering the songs and poems most loved by readers across three centuries, from "Auld Lang Syne" to "To a Mouse" — a warm and accessible introduction to Burns's world.
8. Penguin Plays: Epitaph for George Dillon / [Wesker] / The Hamlet of Stepney Green — Osborne and Creighton's early collaboration alongside a Wesker and Bernard Kops's East End fantasia — one of the earliest Penguin Plays volumes and a vivid document of the first wave of British kitchen-sink drama.
9. New English Dramatists 7 — One of the Penguin series that documented the extraordinary flowering of new British playwriting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, collecting plays that changed the shape of the national theatre.
10. New English Dramatists 2 — The second volume in the series, gathering another set of plays from the generation of writers who reinvented British drama after Look Back in Anger opened the door.
11. Three European Plays — Jean Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon, Ugo Betti's The Queen and the Rebels, and Jean-Paul Sartre's In Camera collected in a single Penguin volume — three of the most performed European plays of the mid-twentieth century, each a masterclass in a different mode of theatrical writing.
12. New English Dramatists 9 — The ninth volume in the series, featuring plays by Donald Howarth, Barry Reckord, and Arnold Wesker — essential reading for anyone interested in the full range of what British theatre was doing in this period.
13. Four English Comedies — ed. J.M. Morrell — Volpone (Jonson), The Way of the World (Congreve), She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), and The School for Scandal (Sheridan) in one authoritative Penguin volume — the comic tradition from the Jacobean stage to the eighteenth century in four essential texts.
14. Penguin Plays: Gallows Glorious / Lady Precious Stream / Richard of Bordeaux — Ronald Gow, S.I. Hsiung, and Gordon Daviot together in an earlier Penguin anthology, representing three very different theatrical approaches from the interwar period.
15. Poems of the Late Tang — tr. A.C. Graham (Penguin Classics) — A.C. Graham's acclaimed translations of the great Tang dynasty poets, presented with the scholarly care and lyric sensitivity that made this volume a standard in its field.
16. Selected Poems and Prose — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — A curated selection spanning the visionary heights of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan through the Conversation Poems to his remarkable critical prose — the full range of a genius who never quite finished anything.
17. Electra — Sophocles (Penguin Classics) — Sophocles's devastating account of Electra's grief and revenge, one of the most psychologically intense works in the Greek tragic canon, in the Penguin Classics translation that has introduced generations of readers to ancient drama.
18. John Donne — Poems — A selection spanning the love lyrics, the holy sonnets, and the great elegies — the full scope of the most intellectually demanding and emotionally intense poet of the English Renaissance.
19. W.B. Yeats Selected Poetry — ed. A. Norman Jeffares — Jeffares's authoritative selection from across Yeats's career, from the early Celtic twilight poems through the great middle period to the fierce and visionary late work — the best single-volume introduction to one of the twentieth century's supreme poets.
20. The Orestian Trilogy — Aeschylus (Penguin Classics) — Aeschylus's three-play cycle — Agamemnon, The Choephori, The Eumenides — tracing the curse on the house of Atreus from murder to divine judgment, in a work that invented the dramatic trilogy and has never been surpassed in its scope.
21. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — Penguin Classics — The anonymous fourteenth-century masterpiece of Middle English poetry, in which a strange knight's challenge to Camelot becomes a profound test of courage, honour, and human fallibility — as gripping now as it was six centuries ago.