Classic writing, modern delivery
We’ve turned classic public domain poems, essays, and letters into email newsletters that you can read at your leisure.
What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:9
How it works
Pick a work (or three) from the library.
Choose your delivery cadence — once a day or once a week at your preferred time.
We'll send you an email with an essay, chapter, letter, or poem.
The library
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
The two contrary states of the human soul—Blake's luminous Songs of Innocence answered, poem by poem, by the darker Songs of Experience
47 poems · ~7 weeks
Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics
A reconstruction of Sappho's lost lyrics from surviving fragments — one hundred poems of longing, beauty, and devotion to Aphrodite
100 poems · ~3 months
Poems
Brief, electric, grammatically strange — Dickinson’s three posthumous collections on life, love, nature, and eternity.
446 poems · ~15 months
Collected Poems
Five collections of the poet who made verse from New England’s stone walls, birch trees, and snowy woods—from the lyrics of A Boy’s Will to the dramatic dialogues of North of Boston and the wit of New Hampshire
164 poems · ~6 months
Poems Published in 1820
The perfect final volume—Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, the great Odes, and Hyperion—published the year before Keats died at twenty-five
13 poems · ~3 weeks
Early Poems
Four collections from Millay's incandescent first decade—the visionary title poem of Renascence, the burning candle of A Few Figs from Thistles, the elegies of Second April, and the Pulitzer-winning sonnets of The Harp-Weaver
141 poems · ~5 months
Poems
The essential Rilke in English—from the spare lyrics of The Book of Pictures and the famous object-poems of New Poems (The Panther, Archaic Torso of Apollo) to the mystical Book of Hours
51 poems · ~7 weeks
Goblin Market and Other Poems
From the dark fairy-tale of Goblin Market to devotional lyrics and sonnets—Rossetti's complete collected verse, sensuous and spiritual in equal measure
137 poems · ~5 months
Sonnets
One hundred and fifty-four poems on love, time, beauty, and betrayal—the fair youth, the dark lady, and the rival poet, in the form Shakespeare made his own
154 sonnets · ~5 months
In Memoriam A.H.H.
One hundred and thirty cantos of grief and faith, written over seventeen years after the sudden death of Tennyson's closest friend—Victorian poetry at its most sustained and searching
130 poems · ~4 months
Leaves of Grass
The great democratic poem of the self and America, from the ecstatic Song of Myself to the elegies of old age—Whitman’s lifework, complete.
382 poems · ~14 months
Meditations
A Roman emperor’s private journal of Stoic self-examination—on duty, impermanence, and the discipline of assent.
412 meditations · ~14 months
Essays
The founding texts of the English essay—Bacon’s 59 meditations on truth, death, friendship, cunning, gardens, and the art of getting on in the world.
59 essays · ~2 months
Autobiographies
Two autobiographies by the most powerful American voice against slavery—the terse Narrative of 1845 and the expansive My Bondage and My Freedom of 1855.
37 chapters · ~3 months
Essays
The novelist before fiction—George Eliot’s critical essays on religion, realism, German life, Heine, and the moral imagination that would shape her novels.
12 essays · ~2 months
Essays
America’s philosopher of self-reliance, on the soul, the poet, circles, and the inexhaustible present.
30 essays · ~2 months
Discourses and Enchiridion
The complete Stoic companion to Marcus Aurelius and Seneca—Epictetus on what is in our power, how to bear hardship, and the discipline of the rational will.
118 sections · ~4 months
Autobiography
America’s founding polymath on his own life—from candle-making and print shops to lightning rods and diplomacy—written in three sessions across two decades.
3 parts · ~1 month
Table Talk
Opinionated, digressive, and vividly personal—Hazlitt on painting, genius, going a journey, the fear of death, and the pleasures of saying exactly what you think.
33 essays · ~3 months
Tao Te Ching
The foundational text of Taoism—eighty-one brief verses on the Way, effortless action, and the paradoxical wisdom of yielding
81 chapters · ~3 months
Essays
The inventor of the personal essay, writing with startling intimacy about friendship, death, cannibals, and the unreliability of memory.
107 essays · ~5 months
Selected Writings
The revolutionary pamphleteer at his most urgent—Common Sense, the Crisis papers that steeled Washington’s army, and the Rights of Man.
28 sections · ~3 months
Pensées
Fragments of an unfinished Christian apology—Pascal on the misery and greatness of man, the wager, the God of Abraham, and the thinking reed
14 sections · ~9 months
Selected Writings
The essential Thoreau—Civil Disobedience, Walking, Life Without Principle, and selections from the journal that fed them all.
27 sections · ~6 weeks
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The foundational argument for women’s equality—that the mind has no sex, and education, not nature, makes the difference.
15 chapters · ~7 weeks
Familiar Letters During the Revolution
Husband and wife across a revolution—John in Congress, Abigail on the farm—writing of politics, war, smallpox, children, and the republic they were making.
284 letters · ~10 months
Letters
The letters of a poet who died at twenty-five—to his brothers, friends, and Fanny Brawne—on beauty, suffering, negative capability, and the costs of becoming an artist
164 letters · ~6 months
Turkish Embassy Letters
An ambassador’s wife travels from London to Constantinople—reporting on harems, bathhouses, smallpox inoculation, and a Europe most Englishwomen never saw.
52 letters · ~2 months
Letters to Lucilius
Letters to a young friend on how to live, written in the last years of Seneca’s life under Nero.
124 letters · ~5 months