Egypt’s ancient pyramids, temples, and tombs along the Nile, which have inspired artists and writers for centuries, have also inspired poets—and particularly in the nineteenth century when romanticism was at its height. Egyptologist Donald Ryan here collects a wide variety of English verse composed by British, Irish, and North American poets fired up by the magic, the splendor, or the desolation of the pharaonic ruins and their echoes of a distant history.

Includes verse by: Robert Browning, Lord Byron, John Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, John Ruskin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Lady Wilde, and many more.