The sea hides in everyone's imagination. It is both thrilling and terrifying: the great, alien element. It means romance, escape and adventure, but also sea-monsters and death by drowning. SEA LONGING celebrates the amazing literary richness of this relationship. For British and American writers the ocean itself has always been a magical subject: the people that fringe it, the ships that sail on it, the creatures that lurk in it. From Shakespeare, Marvell and Donne to Melville, Poe andConrad, SEA LONGING charts this great theme through both time and space. Drawn entirely from Penguin Classics and Twentieth-Century Classics, this is an essential for anyone who has stood on the beach and stared out at the waves of a great ocean.