World's Best Poetry, Volume 4: The Higher Life (Part 2)

This anthology gathers centuries of the English language's most profound reflections on the soul's journey toward transcendence. Editor Bliss Carman, Canada's poet laureate, curated these verses not as mere devotion but as an honest reckoning with mortality, immortality, and what lies beyond the veil of earthly life. The collection draws from Milton's haunting passages through Paradise Lost and Dante's extraordinary visions from The Divine Comedy, placing these giants alongside hymns and poems that have sustained generations of believers and seekers. The scope spans from the meditative quiet of anonymous hymns to the thunderous theological imagination of the Renaissance, unified by one question: what does it mean to yearn for the eternal? Here, death is not an ending but a passage, and heaven is both a place and a state of grace. For readers seeking poetry that confronts the great unknowns with beauty rather than fear, this volume offers some of the most eloquent voices in the tradition.