Symbols: A Universal Language looks at the story behind the world's most famous symbols, from the peace sign to the smiley. It shows just how much importance has been attached to the smallest and simplest of ideas and features over 40 of the most significant symbols from religion, politics and popular culture down the centuries. Did you know that 15% of all tweets on twitter contain the hash tag symbol? That's over 41 million uses of # each...

"This is the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than "universal" psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that we all frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon, gold), and gives hundreds of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary concentrates on English literature, but its entries range widely from the Bible and classical authors to the twentieth century, taking in...

"William Blake, poet, artist, and mystic, created a vast multidimensional universe through his verse and art. Spun from a fabric of symbolism and populated by a host of complex characters, Blake's comprehensive world has provided endless inspiration to subsequent generations. For the reader of Blake, background knowledge of his symbolism is a necessity. In this volume, first published in 1965, S. Foster Damon, father of modern Blake studies and professor...

Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) is a collection of wide-ranging essays by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Writing on such subjects as the art of poetry, politics, and the occult, Yeats proves himself to be not only a master of verse and drama, but an immensely talented essayist and thorough scholar. "What is 'Popular Poetry'?" reflects on a changing Irish literary landscape which has, over the course of Yeats' career, established its own place in world literature...

To take critical questions seriously, even passionately, is one of the marks of a genuinely civilized society. It points to both personal disinterestedness and to an imaginative absorption in fundamentals. The American who watches eagerly some tilt in that great critical battle which has gone on for ages and has now reached our shores, is released from his slavery to the immediate and the parochial; he has ceased to flinch at the free exercise of...