Father of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer --
The morning stars: William Langland ; The Pearl Poet ; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ; Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate ; Dunbar, Henryson, James I ; Miracles and moralities ; Poetry of the people --
The rising sun: John Skelton ; Wyatt and Surrey ; Sir Walter Raleigh ; Edmund Spenser ; Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton ; Christopher Marlowe --
Nature's mirror: William Shakespeare --
The gilded age: Ben Jonson ; Nashe and Campion ; Beaumont and Fletcher --
The metaphysical man: John Donne --
After the Renaissance: George Herbert ; Richard Crashaw ; Abraham Cowley ; Henry Vaughan ; Thomas Traherne --
Puritans and cavaliers: Andrew Marvell ; Robert Herrick ; Thomas Carew ; Edmund Waller ; Sir John Suckling ; Richard Lovelace --
Blind visionary: John Milton --
The world as wit: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester ; Margaret Lucas, Duchess of Newcastle ; Aphra Behn ; Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea ; Charles Sedley, Richard Leigh, Ambrose Philips, Thomas Parnell, John Byron ; John Gay ; Jonathan Swift ; Matthew Prior --
Giant dwarf: Alexander Pope --
The decline of elegance: Samuel Johnson ; Charles Churchill ; Matthew Green, John Dyer, James Thomson ; William Collins, William Cowper, George Crabbe ; Thomas Gray ; Oliver Goldsmith ; Christopher Smart ; Thomas Chatterton --
The marriage of Heaven and Hell: William Blake --
Poet and peasant: Robert Burns --
Lost Utopias: William Wordsworth ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; Robert Southey --
Inspired oddities: Walter Savage Landor ; John Clare ; Thomas Lovell Beddoes --
Victim of a legend : George Gordon, Lord Byron --
Rebel against reality: Percy Bysshe Shelley --
"Oh, weep for Adonais": John Keats --
Victorian love story: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning --
Nineteenth-century lights and shadows: Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Emily Brontë ; Arthur Hugh Clough ; Matthew Arnold ; The Pre-Raphaelites ; Coventry Patmore ; Dante Gabriel Rossetti ; Christina Rossetti ; Algernon Charles Swinburne ; Thomas Hardy --
The new world: William Cullen Bryant ; Ralph Waldo Emerson ; John Greenleaf Whittier ; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; James Russell Lowell ; Edgar Allan Poe --
Glory of the commonplace: Walt Whitman --
The soul selects: Emily Dickinson ; Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Turn of the twentieth century: "Fin de siècle" ; Francis Thompson ; A.E. Housman ; Rudyard Kipling ; William Butler Yeats --
New trends in America: Edwin Arlington Robinson ; Robert Frost ; Carl Sandburg ; Vachel Lindsay ; Robinson Jeffers ; Edna St. Vincent Millay --
New trends in England: The Georgians ; W.H. Davies ; Ralph Hodgson --
Walter de la Mare ; Charlotte Mew ; John Masefield ; D.H. Lawrence --
Waste lands: Ezra Pound ; T.S. Eliot --
The age of anxiety: W.H. Auden ; Stephen Spender ; William Empson ; Edith Sitwell ; Wilfred Owen ; Robert Graves ; Wallace Stevens ; William Carlos Williams ; Marianne Moore ; John Crowe Ransom ; Conrad Aiken ; Archibald MacLeish ; E.E. Cummings ; Hart Crane ; Robert Lowell ; Dylan Thomas.

A chronologically arranged anthology and history of poetry supplemented with biographies of the poets.