Semafor Flagship: An exciting and strange adventure

The collected poems of JRR Tolkien are published together for the first time. Tolkien is best known for The Lord of the Ringbut in his early life he had ambitions to be a poet, scholar Tom Emanuel wrote in The Conversation. The new 1,500-page, three-volume collection not only includes completed texts but also shows Tolkien’s many revisions: he was a perfectionist, as evidenced by the 17 years it took him to TLOTRTolkien’s work was about disenchantment, Emanuel wrote, about modernity cutting humanity off from nature and our authentic selves, and his poetry is the same: The Seabellfor example, is about the ‘sorrow for the disappearance of an old world’.