The second part of Goethe's masterpiece opens with Faust struggling to recover from the death of his beloved Gretchen. The quick-witted demon Mephistopheles soon persuades him to look beyond his sorrow and enter the world of politics and power, but the great scholar is still eager for new sensations, and asks Mephistopheles to reveal Helen of Troy to him in a vision. Overwhelmed by her beauty, Faust demands she be brought back from the underworld - but even this fails to bring him contentm...

Credited by many as one of first and foremost pioneers of love poetry, Sappho was a female poet who is believed to have been born on the Greek island of Lesbos in the 6th century BCE. Though her work that survives today exists mostly in fragments, this skillful translation conveys the heartrending rawness that has won her verse so much acclaim from ancient times to the present.

Goethe’s "Faust" is a tragic based on a classic German legend. Goethe wrote it in two parts (Part I in 1808, Part II in 1832), and together they revise the Faustus legend to fit with Romantic sensibilities and eighteenth-century attitudes toward earthly life and the beyond. The theme of a man selling his soul to the devil for earthly desires—fame, knowledge, wealth, power—developed from a profound Christian belief in life after death. Goethe updates the legend by adding a prolonged love st...

A modern translation exclusive to signetFrom perhaps the greatest of the ancient Greek playwrights comes this collection of plays, including Alcestis, Hippolytus, Ion, Electra, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Medea, The Bacchae, The Trojan Women, and The Cyclops.

"A Story of the Golden Age" is a retelling of ancient Greek myths and legends, designed primarily for young readers. James Baldwin weaves together various tales from Greek mythology into a cohesive narrative that captures the essence of the "Golden Age" of Greece—a time of heroes, gods, and legendary adventures.The book focuses on the life and adventures of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, as he embarks on a journey to find his father, who has not returned from the Trojan War. Throughout t...

Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of 21 Homeric characters. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homer's detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted more than 3,000 years ago events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but b...

The inventor of the bucolic genre, Theocritus of Syracuse was a learned poet, who refashioned traditional literary forms in original and highly polished verse on a small scale. Theocritus is best known for poems set in pastoral landscapes, consisting of dialogues and song-contests, combining lyric tone with epic meter. Delphi’s Ancient Classics series provides eReaders with the wisdom of the Classical world, with both English translations and the original Greek texts. This comprehe...

According to the Introduction: "Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. It is as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained craftsmanship, and...

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was perhaps the most intellectually adventurous of the great Romantic poets. A classicist, a headlong visionary, a social radical, and a poet of serene artistry with a lyric touch second to none, Shelley personified the richly various—and contradictory—energies of his time. This compact yet comprehensive collection showcases all the extraordinary facets of Shelley’s art. From his most famous lyrical poems (“Ozymandias,” “The Cloud”) to his political and phi...

Half a Hundred Hero Tales of Ulysses and The Men of Old by Francis Storr is a collection of mythological stories focusing on the adventures of Ulysses (Odysseus) and other heroes from ancient Greek mythology. The book recounts fifty thrilling tales of valor, cunning, and perseverance, including the famous journey of Ulysses as he attempts to return home after the Trojan War, along with the exploits of figures like Achilles, Hector, and Theseus.Storr retells these ancient stories in a way t...

This collection includes: The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Charmides and Other Poems, and Selected Poems. According to Wikipedia: "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death."

The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1892 and remains one of the most popular English poets. The poem tells the story of an heroic princess who forswears the world of men and founds a women's university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are d...