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"Maxims I" (sometimes treated as three separate poems, "Maxims I, A, B and C") and "Maxims II" are pieces of Old English gnomic poetry. The poem "Maxims I" can be found in the Exeter Book and "Maxims II" is located in a lesser known manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B i.
Having first referred to a child's coming of age, the poem describes a number of (particularly fatal) misfortunes which may then befall one: a youth's premature death, famine, warfare and infirmity, the deprivations of a traveller, death at the gallows or on the pyre and self-destructive behaviour through intemperate drinking.
None of the poems is given a title in the manuscript, and there is often no obvious indicator of where one text ends and the next begins, other than a plain initial. Consequently, the titles given to the poems in the Exeter Book are those that editors have established over the years, and very often a given poem will be known by several titles. [12]
The Vercelli Book and Exeter Book contain four long narrative poems of saints' lives, or hagiographies. In Vercelli are Andreas and Elene and in Exeter are Guthlac and Juliana . Andreas is 1,722 lines long and is the closest of the surviving Old English poems to Beowulf in style and tone.
Vercelli Book. The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices (the others being the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library, the Exeter Book in Exeter Cathedral Library, and the Nowell Codex in the British Library). It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century.
Teacher and poet Edward Hirsch explores the ennobling powers of poetry in his compendium of masterful works from around the world, "100 Poems to Break Your Heart" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Read ...
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line [ A ] poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November ...
The Epic of Gilgamesh (/ ˈ ɡ ɪ l ɡ ə m ɛ ʃ /) [2] is an epic from ancient Mesopotamia.The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh (formerly read as Sumerian "Bilgames" [3]), king of Uruk, some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BCE). [1]