CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Plato
The Republic (excerpt)
2. Aristotle
Poetics
3. Horace
“Ars Poetica”
4. Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Germania (excerpt)
5. Longinus(?)
“On the Sublime” (excerpt)
6. Snorri Sturluson
Skáldskaparmál
7. Sir Philip Sidney
The Defence of Poesy
8. John Milton
“Of Education” (excerpt)
9. John Dryden
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
10. Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
11. Samuel Johnson
Lives of the Poets (excerpts)
“Life of Milton”
“Preface to Abraham Cowley”
“Life of Dryden
“Life of Thomas Gray”
12. Thomas Gray
The Progress of Poesy
13. William Wordsworth
Observations Prefixed to Lyrical Ballads
14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV
15. Francis Jeffrey
The State of Modern Poetry (excerpt)
16. William Hazlitt
On Poetry in General (excerpt)
17. Thomas Love Peacock
The Four Ages of Poetry (excerpt)
18. George Gordon, Lord Byron
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (excerpt)
19. Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry
20. William Cullen Bryant
The Poet
21. John Keats
Poems
22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Poet (excerpt)
23. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book (excerpt)
24. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poems
25. Edgar Allan Poe
The Philosophy of Composition
26. Walt Whitman
Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition (1855, excerpt)
27. Matthew Arnold
The Study of Poetry
28. Emily Dickinson
Poems
29. Rudyard Kipling
“Proofs of Holy Writ”
30. Ezra Pound
A Retrospect
31. T. S. Eliot
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
32. Laura (Riding) Jackson
Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality