Explains the basic elements of poetry and groups poems to encourage an analysis of similarities and differences.

Includes indexes.

Between walls /William Carlos Williams -- From the great Bear Lake meditations / J. Michael Yates -- The lost pictures / Hollis Summers -- Dog / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- Time out / Donald Finkel -- An elegy is preparing itself / Donald Justice -- Buick / Karl Shapiro -- El Greco / E.L. Mayo -- With rue my heart is laden / A.E. Housman -- To Lucasta, on going to the wars / Richard Lovelace -- From Nephelidia / Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Sir Beelzebub / Edith Sitwell -- Lenox Avenue mural / Langston Hughes -- How Jack found that beans my go back on a chap / Guy Wetmore Carryl -- To Mistress Margaret Hussey / John Skelton -- After long silence / W.B. Yeats -- Spring and fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Voice of the studio announcer / Archibald MacLeish -- My last duchess / Robert Browning -- From crass times redeemed by dignity of souls / Peter Viereck -- The end of the world / Archibald MacLeish -- The traveler's curse after misdirection / Robert Graves -- From The rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam / Edward Fitzgerald -- L'allegro / John Milton -- II Penseroso / John Milton -- How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix / Robert Browning -- The charge of the light brigade / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- To be, or not to be / William Shakespeare -- Under the greenwood tree / William Shakespeare -- full fathom five / William Shakespeare -- In a time of pestilence / Thomas Nashe -- Socratic / H.D. -- The Negro / James Emanuel. Mr. Bleaney / Philip Larkin -- The farmer's wife / Annd Sexton -- The draft horse / Robert Frost -- The impulse/ Robert Frost -- The fish / Elizabeth Bishop -- The second coming / John William Corrington -- Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Archibald MacLeish -- Strange meeting / Wilfred Owen -- Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas -- The couple overhead / William Meredith -- Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks -- An emblem of two foxes / Barry Spacks -- Two / Robert Canzoneri -- Love and death / John Nims -- Pictures of the gone world #17 / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- Poem to be read t 3:00 A.M. / Donald Justice -- Reincarnation (I) / James Dickey -- Fire and ice / Robert Frost -- Cross ties / X.J. Kennedy -- I hop[e I don't have you next semester / Edwin Godsey -- Still, citizen sparrow / Richard Wilbur -- Burning the letters / Gwendolyn Grew -- Burning love letters / Howard Moss -- A narrow fellow in the grass / Emily Dickinson -- Snake / D.H. Lawrence -- Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats -- Medusa / Louise Bogan -- Genesis: 19 -- Lot alter / Howard Nemerov -- The narrative Hooper and L.D.O. -- Sestina with a long last line / James Whitehead -- Cards and kisses / John Lyly -- sonnet CXXX / William Shakespeare -- Moving / Robert Frost -- My garden / Janice Appleby Succorsa -- Threnody / I.O. Scherzo -- Truth / Howard Nemerov -- A sort of a song / William Carlos Williams -- The lyric pulse / Anonymous -- The lover showeth how he is forsaken of such as he sometime enjoyed / Sir Thomas Wyatt -- The frailty and hurtfulness of beauty / Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey -- To Helen / Edgar Allan Poe -- Love poem / John Frederick Nims -- Adonais / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- In memory of W.B. Yeats / W.H. Auden -- Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred own -- Motley / Walter de la Mare -- Invictus / William Ernest Henley -- To A.D. / Williams Ernest Henley -- The good-morrow / John Donne -- Song / John Donne -- When he who adores thee / Thomas Moore. Song of myself / Walt Whitman -- A valediction forbidding mourning / John Donne -- Departmental / Robert Frost -- Heaven / Rupert Brooke -- Arriving / Daniel Halpern -- Ode on the death of a favorite cat / Thomas Gray -- To a fair lady playing with a snake / Edmund Waller -- A satirical elegy on the death of a late famous general / Jonathan Swift -- The latest decalogue / Arthur Hugh Clough -- Three poems from the Japanese / Yamabe No Akahito -- Written on the wall of Chang's hermitage / Tu Fu -- A friend advises me to stop drinking / Mei Yao Ch'en -- To a traveler / Su Tung P'o -- From a bestiary / Kenneth Rexroth -- The red wheelbarrow / William Carlos Williams -- This is just to say / William Carlos Williams -- I saw a man / Stephen Crane -- The book of wisdom / Stephen Crane -- The heart / Stephen Crane -- The death of the ball turret gunner / Randall Jarrell -- I love you and the rosebush / Armando Uribe -- The world is too much with us; late and soon / William Wordsworth -- Sonnet LXXIII / William Shakespeare -- On first looking into Chapman's Homer / John Keats -- Sonnet / Samuel Daniel -- Young Reynard / George Meredith -- To a waterfowl / William Cullen Bryant -- Poet / Peter Viereck -- Exchange / Dabney Stuart -- Meditation for a pickle suite / R.H.W. Dillard -- Gamecock / James Dickey -- A timepiece / James Merrill -- Sonnet CXLVII / William Shakespeare -- The hippotamus / T.S. Eliot -- The flea / John Donne -- A simile for her smile / Richard Wilbur -- Ars poeticas / Archibald MacLeish -- How do I love thee? / Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- What the sonnet is / Eugene Lee Hamilton -- The great lover / Rupert Brooke -- Scyros / Karl Shapiro -- gee i like to think of dead / E.E. Cummings -- Dirge / Kenneth Fearing -- From hero and Leander / Christopher Marlowe -- Walter Jenks' bath / William Meredith -- A grasshopper / Richard Wilbur -- Ponce de Leon: a morning walk / Al Young -- Dolor / Theodore Roethke -- Some good things to be said for the iron age / Gary Snyder. The times I've lost in wooing / Thomas Moore -- Bright be the place of thy soul / Lord Byron -- When we two parted / Lord Byron -- The Indian serenade / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Love's philosophy / Percy bysshe Shelley -- Rondeau / Leigh Hunt -- Rose Aylmer / Walter Savage Landor -- To Electra / Robert Herrick -- A devout lover / Thomas Randolph -- To Amarantha, that she would dishevel her hair / Richard Lovelace -- Ah, how sweet it is to love / John Dryden -- The definition of love / Andrew Marvell -- I knew a woman / Theodore Roethke -- Detroit Conference of unity and art / Nikki Giovanni -- Romantic / George Garrett -- Thank you for the valentine / Diane Wakoski -- After work / Gary Snyder -- For Jane / Charles Bukowski -- Style / Charles Bukowski -- Short order / Charles Bukowski -- What lips my lips have kissed / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Holy sonnet XIV / John Donne -- Thou art indeed just, Lor / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- On our crucified Lord, naked and bloody / Richard Crashaw -- Love / George Herbert -- A prayer to the father of heaven / John Skelton -- For a dead lady / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- On my first daughter / Ben Jonson -- On my first son / Ben Jonson -- Epitaph on S.P., A child of Queen Elizabeth's chapel / Ben Jonson -- Little elegy / X.J. Kennedy -- On a child who lived one minute / X.J. Kennedy -- Bells for John Whiteside's daughter / X.J. Kennedy -- December 24 and George McBride is dead / Richard Hugo -- A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London / Dylan Thomas -- Elegy for a nature poet / Howard Nemerow / An Irish airman foresees his death / W.B. Yeats -- Soliloquy / Francis Ledwidge -- Aubade: N.Y.C. / Robert Wallace -- The roach / John Raven -- Lying in hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota / James Wright -- The tragedy of the leaves / Charles Bukowski -- Northwest Airlines / Fred Chappell -- The place of backs / W.S. Merwin -- The more loving one / W.H. Auden -- Woodchucks / Maxine Kumin. When I have fears that I may cease to be / John Keats -- High diddle diddle / Anonymous -- Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening / Robert Frost -- The old man's comforts and how he gained them / Robert Southey -- Father Williams / Lewis Carroll -- How the little busy bee / Isaac Watts -- The crocodile / Lewis Carroll -- Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll -- Johnie Armstrong / Anonymous -- Marco Bozzaris / Fitz-Greene Halleck -- Sir Partick Spens / Anonymous -- A ballad of hell / John Davidson -- Edward (Test A) / Anonymous -- Lord Randall (Anonymous) -- Billy boy / Anonymous -- A lyke-wake dirge / Anonymous -- The yarn of the Nancy Bell / William Schwenck Gilbert -- In a prominent bar in Secaucus one day / X.J. Kennedy -- Captain Carpenter / John Crowe Ransom -- Ballad of the hoppy-toad / Margaret Walker -- Jabberwocky revisited -- Chapter three. The listeners / Walter de la Mare -- Original sin: a short story / Robert Penn Warren -- the rime of the ancient mariner / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Mr. Flood's party / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Ulysses / Alfred Lord Tennyson -- The death of the hired man / Robert Frost -- The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot -- The eye of St. Agnes / John Keats -- The chambered nautilus / Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Mending wall / Robert Frost -- I heard a fly buzz when I died / Emily Dickinson -- Love song: I and thou / alan Dugan -- Night crow / Theodore Roethke -- The rite / Dudley Randall -- Traditional red / Robert Huff -- I move the meeting be adjourned / Nicanor Parra -- Anecdote of the jar / Wallace Stevens -- Birdwatchers of America / Anthony Hecht -- The visiting hour / David Wagoner -- Lying awake / W.D. Snodgrass -- Photographs / Charles Wright -- The one furrow / R.S. Thomas -- A cabin in Minnesota / Marvin Bell -- Chapter four. To James Smith (stanzas 1-3/ Robert Burns -- Verses (stanzas 1-3) / Robert Burns -- A mother's lament for the death of her son / Robert Burns -- Pier Delle Vigne /Dante Alighieri -- How all occasions do inform against me / William Shakespeare.