All You Who Sleep Tonight

By Vikram Seth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990) gathers short poems by Vikram Seth. Its sections move through love and its loss, travel in Asia and Europe, and poems written in the voices of others, some of them drawn from history. Most are formal and rhymed, and many are only a few lines long. The title poem is a brief address to everyone lying awake alone, far from the people they love.

Recommended by 1 person

• Fareed Zakaria: “And Vikram Seth, whose most astonishing work is a novel in verse, “The Golden Gate,” written in iambic tetrameter and modeled on Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” As you read it, you are charmed by the story while still aware and in awe of Seth’s talent.”