INTRODUCTION

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The hundreds of poems selected for this volume span more than four centuries, from the seventeenth-century sonnets of William Shakespeare to the modernist poems of early twentieth-century poets Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot. Although we have limited selections to poems in the English language, all of the poets represented were critically acclaimed in their respective eras and in many cases their poems rank among the best works of literature in their time. A number of these poems were immensely popular and found a wide readership, and some of their writers enjoyed the kind of renown in their time that we confer on celebrities today.

Many of the selections feature lines that are among the most quoted in literature, and that will be familiar to readers who have never read the poems in which they appear. Is there a reader not familiar with Shakespeare ’s love lyric, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” or Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes/And I will pledge with mine”—a love poem so popular that it was later set to music? What was true of the poems of the past is true of more modern verse. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, began her poem “Solitude” with the since oft-quoted words of wisdom, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/Weep and you weep alone.” William Ernest Henley, also writing at the turn of the twentieth century, gave us one of the most quoted lines of inspirational verse when he concluded his poem “Invictus” with “I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul.” Lines such as these, which are frequently sampled today for books of famous quotations or put into service as epigraphs for works of fiction and non-fiction, attest to the unique power of poets and their poems to sum up in a handful of carefully chosen words or a carefully phrased observation the essence of human experience in a way that speaks memorably to people over time and across cultures.

The subjects of the poems are as varied as the poets who wrote them. Love, one of the most popular poetic themes, is the theme of William Shakespeare ’s sonnets, William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, and Edgar Allan Poe ’s elegy to his lost Annabel Lee. There are inspirational poems by William Henley and Rudyard Kipling and poems concerned with death and disillusionment by A. E. Housman and Edward Arlington Robinson. Some poems are deeply personal, such as John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, while others, including Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” are profoundly political. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and John McCrae are represented by poems on serious patriotic themes, while Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll provide delightful nonsense verse and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter de la Mare flights of fancy that verge on the supernatural. There are poems expressing private yearning from William Butler Yeats and John Masefield and poems that generalize about the human condition from Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Thomas Hardy. Poems from John Keats and Emily Dickinson are meditative and reflective, while poems from Alfred Noyes and Edna St. Vincent Millay relate their stories in straightforward narratives. Some poems, such as those of Matthew Arnold and Robert Frost, are rooted in fundamental human experience, while poems from William Blake and Joyce Kilmer look to divine authority.

Although some of these poems share themes and verse forms, each is a unique work, individualized through the means by which the poet uses metaphor, allusion, symbolism, and rhyme to elaborate its ideas. All suggest a world much greater than can be encompassed within their words, and the way in which they transport the reader to that realm is a large part of the pleasure they offer.