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The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal. We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.

In 1890 W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys founded a poetry club. Based mainly at Fleet Street’s immortal ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ pub, with occasional appearances at the Domino room in the Café Royal, poets gathered together to dine and drink. Whilst it was based on a core of poets, many others attended on an ad hoc basis including Oscar Wilde, Francis Thompson & Lord Alfred Douglas. The camaraderie, banter and poetry that played out in their dreams, ambitions and for many, their difficult lives led Yeats to call them ‘the tragic generation’.

Ernest Bramah was born on 20th March 1868. He was an intensely private man and very little about his life was ever released. He obtained success in his own right with the creation of the storyteller Kai Lung with humourous tales set in China, usually laced with fantasy elements. There seems to have been a certain vogue for stories with an oriental element at this time, which Bramah was happy to take advantage of. In 1914 Bramah created the blind detective Max Carrados. Despite the obvious obstacle to his deductive powers, he was a literary and commercial success.

Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night. From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge, on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant. It’s an apt comparison. Pain was also a master of disturbing prose but able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works. A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as many of these short stories demonstrate.

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.

William Hope Hodgson was born in Essex, England, on November 15th, 1877. Over his short career he produced a large body of work which explored and covered many genres. From horror, to science fiction, to stories on the sea, where he had spent much of his early life. One of his most memorable creations was his Carnacki, Supernatural Detective creation. This fused together his passion for sleuthing and interest in the Occult. It was a memorable success.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on August 28th, 1814, at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family with Huguenot, Irish and English roots. Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu had written and published twelve stories which purported to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. Set mostly in Ireland they include classic stories of gothic horror, with grim, shadowed castles, as well as supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, together with madness and suicide.

Aphra Behn was a prolific and well-established poet and playwright but facts about her life remain scant and difficult to confirm. What can safely be said is that Aphra Behn is regarded as a key English playwright and a major figure in Restoration theatre. Her poetry is now far more appreciated and seen as a breakthrough for women of the 17th Century and beyond. Her first play, ‘The Forc’d Marriage’, was staged in 1670, and thereafter many followed, including her later comic works, which were more commercially successful.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Whilst Europe endured the Dark Ages in the 6th & 7th Centuries, devotees of Shiva and Vishnu in Southern India were creating the Bhakti Movement. Some of these exponents, as in our volume, were bestowed with the title of saint but some had the additional title of sant, swami or goswami. Broadly speaking, Bhakti poetry, as in Hinduism itself, is divided into ‘Nirguna’, the idea that the divine is formless as exampled by Kabir and ‘Saguna’, which interprets the divine as having physical form as captured by Mirabai.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22nd May 1859. His literary career burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis, Moriarty.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. Amongst F. Scott Fitzgerald's many short story gems is ‘The Four Fists’. It follows a life, from boyhood to maturity, and how an occasional brush with physical force influences and changes that life.

Aleksander Głowacki, who wrote under the nom de plume Boleslaw Prus, was born on 20th August 1847 at Hrubieszów in the Kingdom of Poland, at that time, controlled by the Russian Empire. It seems he had doubts as to the scale of his talents and early on adopted the name ‘Boleslaw Prus’, for both his journalistic and literary offerings. His work as a short-story writer met with much acclaim. He wrote several dozen of them, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length from micro-story to novella. His keen observation of everyday life and sense of humor are evident in them.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Pearl Zane Grey was born on 31st January 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. From an early age, he was intrigued by history, fishing, baseball, and writing. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories, consuming dime store novels by the dozen. His first magazine article, about one of his fishing expeditions, was published in 1902. It was not until 1910 that he wrote his first Western, ‘The Heritage of the Desert’. It was a breakthrough title and quickly became a bestseller.

Here we journey with our classic poets from Christina Georgina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy to Frances W. Harper and Kipling, not only the ways, the wonders and the women who take on the responsibility to raise children no matter the problems or dangers to themselves, but also the difficulties and sometimes desperate tragedies that motherhood can involve. We hope these poems inspire every generation to reach out and better themselves and those around. This is our tribute to mothers everywhere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4th July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a town synonymous with the earlier Salem Witch Trials. It was instrumental in Hawthorne’s later use of American Gothic and dark romanticism in his writing. ‘Rapaccinni’s Daughter’ is a classic piece of literature from his pen. Set in Italy, it is an unsettling story of romance destroyed by science.

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was born on 9th February 1863 in Clapton, London. He was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford. Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister and was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. Despite what was thought to be a promising legal career, he had literary ambitions and wrote in his spare time. His early works appeared in various periodicals of the day but for his first book, ‘A Man of Mark’ (1890), with no publisher interested, he published with his own resources.

Katherine was born on the 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand, the middle child of five. At 19 Katherine left for England, where she met and befriended the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, amongst others. She then travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand. There she began to write the short stories that she would later become so famous for. But there was another less-heralded side to Katherine’s writings; that of poetry. Her verse certainly reflects much of the themes of her life and interests.