Table Of Contents:
Introduction xv

James Earl Jones
On Poetry Out Loud 1(6)

Poems of Love and Wreckage 7(28)

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Christopher Marlowe

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

Edward Lear

``Ye tradeful Merchants that with weary toil''

Edmund Spenser

``My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun''

William Shakespeare

From Philip Sparrow

John Skelton

The Sniffle

Ogden Nash

To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell

Master Charge Blues

Nikki Giovanni

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae

Ernest Dowson

I Knew a Woman

Theodore Roethke

The Sun Rising

John Donne

John Donne in California

Amy Clampitt

``They flee from me that sometime did me seek''

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Fourth Dance Poem

Gerald W. Barrax

Light Verse and Poems that Tell Stories 35(28)

Limericks with a Civil Lear

Edward Lear

Ogden Nash

Robert Frost

Clerihews, Straightly and Bentley

Paul Horgan

William Jay Smith

Jonathan Williams

Jaques Barzun

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Jabberwocky

Lewis Carroll

``anyone lived in a pretty how town''

e.e. cummings

Casey at the Bat

Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Children's Story

Ricky Walters

Fuzzy Wuzzy

Rudyard Kipling

Corroboree

Kath Walker

The Unquiet Grave---Traditional British ballad

Calverly's

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Aboard at a Ship's Helm

Walt Whitman

Crossing the Bar

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Views

Mona Van Duyn

From a Railway Carriage

Robert Louis Stevenson

Poems of Animals and the Natural World 63(26)

The Greater Cats

Victoria Sackville-West

The Heaven of Animals

James Dickey

The Tyger

William Blake

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Cecil Frances Alexander

The Oven-Bird

Robert Frost

Proud Songsters

Thomas Hardy

Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes

Thomas Gray

The Cat as Cat

Denise Levertov

``Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?''

Sir Philip Sidney

Lament for Toby, a French Poodle

May Sarton

Orchard

H.D.

Cameos

Rita Dove

A Description of a City Shower

Jonathan Swift

Poems of Contradiction and Opposition 89(26)

From ``The General Prologue,'' The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

From ``The Burial of the Dead,'' The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

W.H. Auden

Concord Hymn

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concord

Robert Lowell

Atticus

Alexander Pope

Novelists

Howard Nemerov

My Heart Leaps Up

William Wordsworth

The World's Greatest Tricycle-Rider

C.K. Williams

A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age

Alice Meynell

To W.B.Y.

Julia Randall

``It was not Death, for I stood up''

Emily Dickinson

The Movement of My Father's Death

Sharon Olds

``When I consider how my light is spent''

John Milton

``Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night''

Dylan Thomas

Poems of Vision 115(24)

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Second Coming

W.B. Yeats

Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold

God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Canal Bank Walk

Patrick Kavanagh

As on a Darkling Plain

Henry Taylor

Diving into the Wreck

Adrienne Rich

The Good Man in Hell

Edwin Muir

Dream Deferred

Langston Hughes

Ode on Melancholy

John Keats

Janet Waking

John Crowe Ransom

The Maldive Shark

Herman Melville

The Yachts

William Carlos Williams

Poems of Alienation 139(58)

Summer is icumen in

Anonymous

Ancient Music

Ezra Pound

The White City

Claude McKay

Leaving Port Authority for the St. Regis Rezz

Wendy Rose

O Black and Unknown Bards

James Weldon Johnson

The Heart

Stephen Crane

April Mortality

Leonie Adams

After Death

Christina Rossetti

True Story of the Pins

Alberto Rios

Delight in Disorder

Robert Herrick

Devolution of the Nude

Lynne McMahon

American Names

Stephen Vincent Benet

Old New England

Derek Walcott

Israel

Karl Shapiro

The Last Knocks

Fadwa Tuqan (trans. Issa J. Boullata)

Art, Poetry, and the Making Thereof 165(32)

The Trees

Philip Larkin

Blackberrying

Sylvia Plath

Coon Song

A.R. Ammons

From ``The Prologue''

Anne Bradstreet

We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks

In the National Gallery

Siegfried Sassoon

Nude Descending a Staircase

X.J. Kennedy

Sonnet--To Science

Edgar Allan Poe

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Wallace Stevens

My Grandfather's Church Goes Up

Fred Chappell

Virtue

George Herbert

In Memory of David Kalstone, Who Died of AIDS

Anthony Hecht

Missing Dates

William Empson

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry

Marianne Moore

Deaf Poem

Tess Gallagher
Further Notes on the Poems 197(8)
Index of Poems by Title 205(4)
Index of First Lines 209(4)
Index of Authors 213