Preface
Adknowlegements
Caedmon's hymn
Beowulf
The wife's lament
The seafarer
Geoffrey Chaucer --William Langland
Pearl --Charles D'Orleans
William Dunbar
John Skelton
Thomas Wyatt
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Anne Askew
Queen Elizabeth I
George Gascoigne
Isabella Whitney
Chidiock Tichborne
Sir Walter Ralegh
Edmund Spenser
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
John Lyly
Sir Philip Sidney
George Peele
Thomas Lodge
Robert Southwell
Mary Sidney
Samuel Daniel
Michael Drayton
Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare
Thomas Campion
Thomas Nashe
Aemilia Lanyer
John Donne
Ben Johnson
John Fletcher Thomas Carew
James Shirley
Edmund Waller
John Milton
Sire John Suckling
Anne Bradstreet
Richard Crashaw
Abraham Cowley
Richard Lovelace
Andrew Marvell
Henry Vaughan
Margaret Cavendish
John Dryden
Katherine Philips
Thomas Traherne
Edward Taylor
Aphra Behn
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Anne Killigrew
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Mathew Prior
Jonathan Swift
Isaac Watts
John Gay
Alexander Pope
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Matthew Green
James Thomson
Charles Wesley
Samuel Johnson
homas Gray
William Collins
Jean Elliot
Christopher Smart
Oliver Goldsmith
William Cowper
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Hannah More
Charolotte Smith
Philip Freneau
Phillis Wheatley
George Crabbe
William Blake
Robert Burns
Joanna Baillie
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Walter Savage Landor
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Clare
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
William Cullen Bryant
John Keats
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Greenleaf Whittier
Edward Fitzgerald
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Edgar Allan Poe
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Edward Lear
Jones Very
Henry David Thoreau
Emily Bronte
Arthur Hugh Clough
Julia Ward Howe
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
Mathew Arnold
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
George Meredith
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
William Morris
W. S. Gilbert
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thomas Hardy
Sidney Lanier
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Emma Lazarus
A. E. Housman
Rudyard Kipling
William Butler Yeats
Ernest Dowson
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Charolette Mew
Stephen Crane
Paul Laurence Dunbar
John McCrae
Walter De La Mare
Robert Frost
Amy Lowell
Gertrude Stein
Trumbull Stickney
Carl Sandberg
Edward Thomas
Wallace Stevens
Witter Bynner
E. J. Pratt
William Carlos Williams
D. H. Lawrence
Ezra Pound
Elinor Wylie
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Sigfried Sassoon
Robinson Jeffers
Rupert Brooke
Marianne Moore
Edwin Muir
T. S. Elliot
John Crowe Ransom
Conrad Aiken
Ivor Gurney
Isaac Rosenberg
Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve)
Archibald MacLeish
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wilfred Owen
Dorothy Parker
E. E. Cummings
Jean Toomer
Robert Graves
Edmund Blunden
Louise Bogan
Hart Crane
Allen Tate
Basil Bunting
Sterling A. Brown
Langston Hughes
Roy Campbell
Ogden Nash
Stevie Smith
Countee Cullen
Earle Birney
C. Day Lewis
Richard Eberhart
Patrick Kavanagh
Stanley Kunitz
Robert Penn Warren
John Betjeman
William Empson
W. H. Auden
A. D. Hope
Louis MacNeice
Josephine Jacobsen
Theodore Roethke
Richard Wright
Malcolm Lowry
Stephen Spender
Robert Fitzgerald
Norman MacCaig
Charles Olson
Elizabeth Bishop
Allen Curnow --Irving Layton
Robert Hayden
Muriel Rukeyser
May Swenson
R. S. Thomas
John Berryman
Randall Jarrell
Weldon Kees
Norman Nicholson
Henry Reed
Dylan Thomas
Alun Lewis
Margaret Walker
Judith Wright
David Gascoyne
P. K. Page
Gwendolyn Brooks
Charles Causley
Robert Lowell
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
William Meredith
Amy Clampitt
Barbara Guest
Edwin Morgan
Keith Douglas
Howard Nemerov
George Mackay Brown
Mona Van Duyn
Richard Wilbur
Donald Davie
Sidney Keyes
Philip Larkin
Howard Moss
James Dickey
Peter Kane Dufault
Anthony Hecht
Richard Hugo
Denise Levertov
John Ormon
James Schuyler
Donald Justice
Carolyn Kizer
Kenneth Koch
A. R. Ammons
James K. Baxter
Robery Bly
Robert Creeley
Allen Ginsberg
James Merrill
Frank O'Hara
W. D. Snodgrass
Elizabeth Jennings
John Ashbery
Galway Kinnell
W. S. Merwin
Charles Tomlinson
James Wright
Peter Davison
Donald Hall
Thomas Kinsella
Philip Levine
Anne Sexton
L. E. Sissman
Thom Gunn
John Hollander
Richard Howard
John Montague
Peter Porter
Adrienne Rich
A. K. Ramanujan
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Gregory Corso
Ted Hughes
Gary Snyder
Derek Walcott
Alan Brownjohn
Jay MacPherson
Geoffrey Hill
Sylvia Plath
John Updike
Anne Stevenson
Fleur Adcock
Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
Audre Lorde
N. Scott Momaday
Wole Soyinka
Mark Strand
Chalres Wright
Daryl Hine
C. K. Williams
Tony Harrison
Eleanor Wilner
Dom Moraes
Les Murray
Charles Simic
Margaret Atwood
Seamus Heaney
Michael Longley
Robert Pinskey
Billy Collins
Robert Hass
Derek Mahon
Eric Ormsby
Douglas Dunn
Alfred Corn
Louise Gluck
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Palmer
Eavan Boland
Craig Raine
Kit Wright
Wendy Cope
Yusef Komunyakaa
Jane Shore
Richard Kenney
Robyn Sarah
Agha Shahid Ali
James Fenton
Charles Bernstein
Anne Carson
Dana Gioia
Nicholas Christopher
Jorie Craham
Paul Muldoon
Rita Dove
Daniel Hall
Sean O'Brien
Vikram Seth
Gary Soto
Brad Leithauser
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Louise Erdrich
Carol Ann Duffy
Dionisio D. Martinez
Le-Young Lee
Cynthia Zarin
Lavinia Greenlaw
Glyn Maxwell
Simon Armitage
Greg Williamson
Versification
Edward Herbert
Mary Wroth
Robert Herrick
Henry King
George Herbert
Poetic Syntax
Biographical Sketches - Permissions acknowledgements
Index