A Midnight Treasury of Macabre and Weird Poems

A handsome tome of dark poetry to feed the fans of all things macabre, gothic, and weird.

The perfect book for fans of Edgar Allan Poe and, more widely, for those who love their dark side with a touch of horror. Poetry’s fascination with the weird and the macabre has a long literary history, and Sampson sates modern appetites with this curated collection of over 300 of the best poems published on the subject.

There is a fine and terrible tradition of poetry of the occult, the macabre, and the sinister, and this anthology will introduce the reader to both celebrated antiheroes like Keats’s serpentine Lamia and Christina Rossetti’s thirsty goblins, and less well-known figures from nightmare, such as Violet Fane’s deadly Victorian siren and Clare Pollard’s ultramodern Reynardine. From the gothic dreamscapes of Edgar Allan Poe to Coleridge’s unhallowed ocean, explore the mind’s dark places with poems that stretch back centuries to the latest terror from today’s bards. The sinister but seductive beauty of illustrators such as Harry Clarke accompany the poems in a volume that will speak to those drawn to the dark.

Ana Sampson is the author of many best-selling poetry anthologies. Recently she has published the anthologies She is Fierce, Gods and Monsters, Heroes and Villains (the latter two illustrated by Chris Riddell). Her best-selling anthologies include I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Other Poems You Half-Remember from School, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright: Much Loved Poems You Half-Remember, Poems to Learn by Heart, Green and Pleasant Land: Best-Loved Poems of the British Countryside, and Best-Loved Poems: A Treasury of Verse.