Series statement from publisher's website.

Includes index.

Gods, heroes and monsters : The Epic of Gilgamesh -- War, adventure, love : Homer, Sappho -- Latin classics : Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal -- Anglo-Saxon poetry : Beowulf, laments and riddles -- Continental masters of the Middle Ages : Dante, Daniel, Petrarch, Villon -- A European poet : Chaucer -- Poets of the seen world and the unseen : The Gawain poet, Hafez, Langland -- Tudor Court poets : Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser -- Elizabethan love poets : Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney -- Copernicus in poetry : John Donne -- An age of individualism : Jonson, Herrick, Marvell -- Religious individualists : Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne -- Poetry from the world beyond : John Milton -- The Augustan age : Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith -- The other Eighteenth Century : Montagu, Egerton, Finch, Tollet, Leapor, Yearsley, Barbauld, Blamire, Baillie, Wheatley, Duck, Clare, Thomson, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, Smart -- Communal poetry : popular ballads and hymns -- Lyrical ballads, and after : Wordsworth and Coleridge -- Second-generation romantics : Keats and Shelley -- Romantic eccentrics : Blake, Byron, Burns -- From Romanticism to Modernism in German poetry : Goethe, Heine, Rilke -- Making Russian literature : Pushkin, Lermontov -- Great Victorians : Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold -- Reform, resolve and religion, Victorian women poets : Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti -- American revolutionaries : Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson -- Shaking the foundations : Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, Dylan Thomas, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Swinburne, Katharine Harris Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Charlotte Mew, Oscar Wilde -- New voices at the end of an era : Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Hopkins -- The Georgian poets : Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Davies, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, W.W. Gibson, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence -- Poetry of the First World War : Stadler, Toller, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, Cole, Cannan, Sinclair, McCrae -- The great escapist : W.B. Yeats -- Inventing Modernism : Eliot, Pound -- West meets East : Waley, Pound, the Imagists -- American Modernists : Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Esther Popel, Helene Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes -- Getting over Modernism : Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop -- The Thirties poets : Auden, Spender, MacNeice -- Poetry of the Second World War : Douglas, Lewis, Keyes, Fuller, Ross, Causley, Reed, Simpson, Shapiro, Wilbur, Jarrell, Pudney, Ewart, Sitwell, Feinstein, Stanley-Wrench, Clark -- American confessional poets, and others : Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, Roethke -- The movement poets and associates : Larkin, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Betjeman, Stevie Smith -- Fatal attractions : Hughes, Plath -- Poets in politics : Tagore, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Brodsky, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Seferis, Seifert, Herbert, MacDiarmid, R.S. Thomas, Amichai -- Poets who cross boundaries : Heaney, Walcott, Angelou, Oliver, Murray.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work--over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world's poems--and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.