The Four Seasons

For the poet, even the most minute details of the natural world may be a source of inspiration, and the pages of this collection celebrating the four seasons are brimming with an extraordinary range of observation and imagery. Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as physical expressions of the ineffable. From Langston Hughes’s moody ‘Summer Night’ in Harlem to the chilling ‘mind of winter’ in Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage with the world outside ourselves.