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One of Henry James's most mesmerizing and unusual novels, The Sacred Fount (1901) has for its scene a weekend party at the great English country house Newmarch. Here James leads the reader down a bizarre garden path. The Sacred Fount--his only novel to employ a first-person narrator--places us in the hands of an obsessive novelist (never named and never described, but perhaps familiar), who detects alarming changes in his acquaintances. A woman known for her élan has lost her poise, a dull man is charming; a friend is suddenly aged, a plain woman sparkles. Where one improves, another seems to suffer. With "plunges of insight," "as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird," the narrator stalks his fellow guests through the weekend, avidly trying to make sense of what he comes to believe are actual exchanges of life force. "The sacred fount," as R.P. Blackmur noted, "is the mystery of the power that passes among us, depleting or restoring us, in friendship, in love, even in more public relations .... [Here] is the beautiful, the critical job of making that mystery manifest."

The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound contains the complete text, the poet's first six books, their title pages in facsimile (A Lume Spento, 1908; A Quinzaine for This Yule, 1908; Personae, 1909; Exultations, 1909; Canzoni, 1911; Ripostes, 1912), and the long poem Redondillas (1911), for many years available only in a rare limited edition. There are, in addition, twenty-five poems originally published in periodicals but not previously collected, as well as thirty-eight others drawn from miscellaneous manuscripts. Ezra Pound's 1926 collection, entitled Personae after his earlier volume of that name, was his personal choice of all the poems he wished to keep in print other than some translations and his Cantos. It was intended to be the definitive collection of his shorter poems, and so it should remain. Yet even the discarded works of a great poet are of value and interest to students and devotees. Originally, brought out clothbound by New Directions in 1976, the texts were established at the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries of The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They were edited by Michael King under the direction of Louis L. Martz, who wrote the introduction, and Donald Gallup, formerly Curator of American Literature. Included are textual and bibliographic notes as well as indexes of titles and first lines.

The Noh plays of Japan have been compared to the greatest of Greek tragedies for their evocative, powerful poetry and splendor of emotional intensity.

Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese (1955) proved such an extremely popular book that he put together a sequel. The poems are representative of a large range of classical, medieval, and modern poetry, but the emphasis, as in him companion Chinese collections (1955 and 1970), is on folk songs and love lyrics.

Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) was without a doubt the greatest modern Provençal poet and the foremost champion of his native Provence, the guiding spirit of a group of latter-day troubadours who revived and refined the language of Southern France as a literary medium. For this achievement and for his own poetry, Mistral was awarded the Nobel prize in 1904--characteristically, he gave the prize money to a folklore museum he had founded in Arles. Two years later, at the age of seventy-six, Mistral published his charming book of Memoirs, which is not so much an autobiography as a recollection of the life of ordinary country people in his early years, filled with delightful anecdotes, tales, folksongs, and poetry. Written in the relaxed conversational style of an elderly gentleman reminiscing about the old days, the Memoirs describe the circumstances of Mistral's childhood and early manhood - the Provençal landscapes, the seasonal life of the farm, the religious observances and seasonal festivities, many clearly of pagan origin. Although educated in the classics and law in Avignon and Aix, Mistral felt out of place among the French-speaking bourgeois and returned to his family farm to devote his life to writing for the simple farming people of his region. He soon began his long poem Mireio (eventually transformed into the opera Mireille by Gounod), whose heroine was modeled on the peasant girls he saw and worked with daily. At the same time, he and several other young men came together to form the Felibrige, a society dedicated to restoring the Provençal language and preserving local traditions. The Memoirs concludes with the death of young Mistral's father and the success of Mireio (1859), so quietly understated that one would hardly suspect that the author had been hailed as a major poet while still in his twenties. Mistral wrote his Memoirs in Provençal and himself translated them into French. A previous English translation (abridged and paraphrased from the French) was published in 1907 and has been out of print ever since. In his new translation, George Wickes of the University of Oregon has mined Mistral's monumental dictionary, Lou Tresor dóu Félibrige. This illustrated edition includes the original texts of Provençal songs and verse, with Professor Wickes' English versions printed en face.

"The Theatre of Tennessee Williams" brings together in a matching format the plays of a genius of the American theatre. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

Completed one year after his classic Winesburg, Ohio and long regarded as his finest novel, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White captures the spirit of small-town America during the Machine Age. Hugh McVey is a protagonist Robert Lovett once called "a symbol of the country itself in its industrial progress and spiritual impotence." A lonely and passionate inventor of farm machinery, he struggles to gain love and intimacy in a community where "life had surrendered to the machine." Through his story Anderson aims his criticism at the rise of technology and industry at the turn of the century. Simultaneously, he renders a tale of eloquent naturalism and disturbing beauty. Poor White was praised by such writers as H. L. Mencken and Hart Crane when it was first published. It remains a curiously contemporary novel, and a marvelous testament to Sherwood Anderson's "sombre metaphysical preoccupation and his smouldering sensuousness" (The New Republic).

They are taken from the Paris books Black Spring (1936) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and were for the most part, written at about the satire time as Tropic of Capricorn-the period of Miller's and Durrell's life in the famous Villa Seurat in Paris.As is usual with Miller, these pieces cannot be tagged with the label of any given literary category. The unforgettable portrait of Max, the Paris drifter, and the probably-autobiographical Tailor Shop, are basically short stories, but even here the irrepressible vitality of Miller's personality keeps breaking into the narrative. And in the critical and philosophical essays, the prose poems and surrealist fantasies, the travel sketches and scenarios, Miller's passion for fiction, for telling the endless story of his extraordinary life, cannot be held down. Life, as no other modern author has lived it or can write it, bursts from these pages-the life of the mind and the body; of people, places and things; of ideas and the imagination.

Sartre's study of Baudelaire is one of the more brilliant achievements of modern criticism. We may often disagree with his interpretations of the poet's personality, but we cannot fail to wonder at the mastery with which he presents his case. It is the case, quite patently, of an Existentialist who wishes to psychoanalyze a paramount literary figure in terms of his own beliefs.Perhaps Sartre's greatest contribution to Existentialism has been his own personality. He made it a living philosophy, giving it his exotic imagination, his penchant for controversy, and above all his daring. He turned abstractions like Existence and Being, Freedom and Nature, into a theory of psychoanalysis, grounded in man's creativity and opposed to Freudian determinism. Then he put the theory into practice in this book on Baudelaire.Baudelaire, man of shadows, opium-addict, dandy, frigid disciple of volupté; and then the greatest lyric poet of the age. Sartre lays bare the "lunar landscape of this distressed soul." We see Baudelaire, with anguished intelligence, selecting and arranging his own evil destiny, juggling the values of a world at the turning point of modern times.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, Félicité, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions. "Flaubert is diagnosis," Ezra Pound wrote, "the whole of Flaubert, the whole fight for the novel as 'histoire morale contemporaine' was a fight against maxims, against abstractions, a fight back toward a human and/or total conception."

The lyric poetry of Tu Fu ranks with the greatest in all world literature. Across the centuries-Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (731-770)-his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful.Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume. The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction, biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry.

They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater.Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life-its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love-into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue.Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.

The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro), the first collection of new poems by the great Mexican author Octavio Paz since his Return (Vuelta) of 1975, was originally published as the final section of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Among these later poems is a series of works dedicated to such artists as Miró, Balthus, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Alechinsky, Monet, and Matta, as well as a number of epigrammatic and Chinese-like lyrics. Two remarkable long poems --"I Speak of the City," a Whitmanesque apocalyptic evocation of the contemporary urban nightmare, and "Letter of Testimony," a meditation on love and death--are emblematic of the mature poet in a prophetic voice.

An Absurd Vice, the critical biography of Cesare Pavese by his friend and fellow-writer Davide Lajolo, has been celebrated in Italy since its publication there in 1960. With well-balanced affection and blame, it presents a portrait of the prize-winning author of the House on the Hill, Work Wearies and other books of fiction and poetry, dedicated editor at the Einaudi Publishing House, and renowned translator of such classics as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick, who was yet unable to shake what he ruefully called his "absurd vice"- a lifelong obsession with suicide. "Mine would be a biography to be written with a scalpel," Pavese once told Lajolo, "I am made up of too many parts that do not blend." Born in rural Piedmont in 1908, Pavese returned, throughout his working life in the city of Turin, to his native hills for solace and inspiration. His friends and admirers included the great Italian literati of the day, yet he remained a lonely man who, after losing his first love, never made his peace with womankind. Several of his friends lost their lives in World War II and the Italian civil war of resistance, and Pavese himself spent a year in exile. But in 1950, having survived the Fascist era, believing Communism to offer hope for his country's future, and at the height of his fame, he nevertheless took his own life. Translated and edited with an introduction by Mario and Mark Pietralunga.

Readers who have discovered the delights of the British master storyteller H.E. Bates in A Month by the Lake and A Party for the Girls (published by New Directions in 1987 and 1988) will welcome this third collection, Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree. Gathered here are twenty stories written between 1938 and 1964 which, like those of Chekhov, to whom Bates has often been compared, are gems of human observation. There is the sheer hilarity of "An Italian Haircut," the wincing cruelty of "The Captain," the childhood enchantment of "Love in a Wych Elm," the estrangments of divorce in "Some Other Spring"--to mention just a few of the colors on H.E. Bates' palette. And any reader who has met the dotty Aunt Leonora (in "The Chords of Youth" and "A Month by the Lake") will relish meeting her again in the "The Trespasser," the concluding story of this volume.

Many critics regard the work of Saint John of the Cross (1542-91), the 16th-century mystic, to be among the finest poetry Spain has produced. This bilingual edition, the first in modern English, was originally published in hard cover in 1968 by the Indiana University Press. Most of these poems were written during a period of nine months, in 1577-78, when Saint John (San Juan de la Cruz) was imprisoned and tortured in the dungeon of a small Carmelite monastery in Toledo, and their recurrent motifs are both metaphysical and deeply personal.

The Europe of Trusts contains three brilliant, long-unavailable books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980s: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. These are the landmark books--following her volumes from the previous decade (Hinge Picture, Chanting at the Crystal Sea, Cabbage Gardens, and Secret History of the Dividing Line)--which established Howe as "one of America's foremost experimental writers" (Publishers Weekly). "Her work," as Geoffrey O'Brien put it, "is a voyage of reconnaissance in language, a sounding out of ancient hiding places, and it is a voyage full of risk. 'Words are the only clues we have,' she has said. 'What if they fail us?'"

Landing on the Mexican coast on Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés felthimself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and convert the firstadvanced civilization Europeans had yet encountered in the West. ForMontezuma, leader of the Mexicans, April 21, 1519 (known in theirsophisticated astronomical system as 9 Wind Day) was the precise date ofa dire prophesy: the return of Quetzalcoatl, a fearsome god predictedto arrive by ship, from the East, with light skin, a black beard, robedin black-exactly as Cortés would. The ensuing drama is described byeminent historian Maurice Collis in a style that is equal parts storyand scholarship. Though its consequences have been treated by writers asdiverse as D.H. Lawrence and Charles Olson, never before have the factsof this event been rendered with such extraordinary clarity andelegance.

Blood Wedding. Concerned with love that cannot become marriage among the primitive hill people of Castile, this is a play of the workings of tremendous passions and tribal ritual toward an inescapable tragic end. Yerma. "The whole tragic burden of Yerma is measured by the deepening of her struggle with the problem of frustrated motherhood." -From García Lorca, by Edwin Honig. The House of Bernarda Alba. Again about "women whom love moves to tragedy," Bernarda Alba tells of the repression of five daughters by a domineering mother, of how their natural spirits circumvent her but bring violence and death.

The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry-a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age-and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared-57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)-here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger-made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Días Hábiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacza el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz's most recent collection, A Tree Within (Árbol Adentro).With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson.