Since the reunification of Germany in the fall of 1989, the world has witnessed the widespread and terrible growth of racial, xenophobic, and fascistic outbursts throughout the country. Though widely reported in newspapers and magazines, this movement has thus far been too volatile for a sustained analysis to be possible. But now, after more than four years of investigation and research, Michael Schmidt - a German filmmaker and journalist - has produced...

Includes material on "the lives and works of over 300 English-language poets of the last 700 years and spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean"--Paperback back cover.

"In The First Poets, Schmidt rescues the lives of classical Greek poets from their relative obscurity. Here is Orpheus, the first of the first poets, healer, mystic, and magical fixer; and Homer, about whom almost nothing is known for certain except the magnificence of his two great epic poems. Here are Linos and Arion, who survive only in legend; and Amphion, who survives through the tales we ascribe to him. Here are Sappho, the greatest Greek woman...