Peter Washington

To the nineteenth-century reader, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was the archetype of the Romantic literary hero, a figure admired and emulated as much for the revolutionary panache with which he lived his life as the brio and allure of his verse. Our century has seen him more clearly as a poet whose intellectual toughness, satiric gifts, and utter inability to be boring have made him one of the great comic spirits in our literature.

In the delightfully small Pocket Poets format that has proved so popular, comes a selection of the early poems of one of the greatest and most influential poets of our century. This essential collection includes that towering landmark of modernism, "The Waste Land", as well as such keenly ironic classics as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales."