Love and war may be huge themes, but Sebastian Faulks approaches them from a microscopic perspective. He detects love in the minute movements of a woman's fingers; in a man's manner of crawling through trenches, he captures fear and torment. Faulks is involved in a romance with detail, charging every

Epic, Intense, Pathos, Realist fiction, Sensual, Violent

In the unceasing rush of the modern world, everything conspires to prevent meditation, awareness, or faith in anything greater than the day's events. Much of contemporary poetry reflects the confusion of accelerated lives: Language poetry presents us with our dislocated selves, while the work of Ashb

Domestic, Modernist poetry, Pathos, Sensual, Visceral

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is no clear form (he did not write sonnets); there's

Anxiety, Dark, Dissonant, Overflowing, Pathos, Surreal, Symbolist poetry

Berryman is a character of literary history who was a mix of eccentricity, emotional instability, and revelatory genius. And his persona was all of his own creating: for example, this native Oklahoman insisted on speaking in a fabricated British accent, usually in the higher registers of his voice.

Confessional poetry, Dreamy, Lyrical, Manic, Modernist poetry, Pathos