Table of Contents
1 Gods, Heroes and Monsters: The Epic of Gilgamesh 1
2 War, Adventure, Love Homer Sappho 7
3 Latin Classics Virgil Horace Ovid Catullus Juvenal 13
4 Anglo-Saxon Poetry Beowulf Laments Riddles 19
5 Continental Masters of the Middle Ages Dante Daniel Petrarch Villon 25
6 A European Poet Chaucer 31
7 Poets of the Seen World and the Unseen The Gawain Poet Hafez Langland 37
8 Tudor Court Poets Skelton Wyatt Surrey Spenser 43
9 Elizabethan Love Poets Shakespeare Marlowe Sidney 50
10 Copernicus in Poetry John Donne 58
11 An Age of Individualism Jonson Herrick Marvell 65
12 Religious Individualists Herbert Vaughan Traherne 74
13 Poetry from the World Beyond John Milton 83
14 The Augustan Age Dryden Pope Swift Johnson Goldsmith 91
15 The Other Eighteenth Century Montagu Egerton Finch Tollet Leapor Yearsley Barbauld Blamire Baillie Wheatley Duck Clare Thomson Cowper Crabbe Gray Smart 98
16 Communal Poetry Popular Ballads Hymns 105
17 Lyrical Ballads, and After Wordsworth Coleridge 112
18 Second-Generation Romantics Keats Shelley 120
19 Romantic Eccentrics Blake Byron Burns 128
20 From Romanticism to Modernism in German Poetry Goethe Heine Rilke 137
21 Making Russian Literature Pushkin Lermontov 145
22 Great Victorians Tennyson Browning Clough Arnold 152
23 Reform, Resolve and Religion: Victorian Women Poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning Emily Brontë Christina Rossetti 160
24 American Revolutionaries Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson 168
25 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 177
26 New Voices at the End of an Era Hardy Housman Kipling Hopkins 184
27 The Georgian Poets Edward Thomas Robert Frost Rupert Brooke Walter de la Mare W.H. Davies G.K. Chesterton Hilaire Belloc W.W. Gibson Robert Graves D.H. Lawrence 192
28 Poetry of the First World War Stadler Toller Grenfell Sassoon Owen Rosenberg Gurney Cole Cannan Sinclair McCrae 200
29 The Great Escapist W.B. Yeats 208
30 Inventing Modernism Eliot Pound 215
31 West Meets East Waley Pound The Imagists 222
32 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 230
33 Getting Over Modernism Marianne Moore Elizabeth Bishop 239
34 The Thirties Poets Auden Spender MacNeice 247
35 Poetry of the Second World War Douglas Lewis Keyes Fuller Ross Causley Reed Simpson Shapiro Wilbur Jarrell Pudney Ewart Sitwell Feinstein Stanley-Wrench Clark 255
36 American Confessional Poets, and Others Lowell Berryman Snodgrass Sexton Roethke 262
37 The Movement Poets and Associates Larkin Enright Jennings Gunn Betjeman Stevie Smith 269
38 Fatal Attractions Hughes Plath 276
39 Poets in Politics Tagore Akhmatova Mandelstam Mayakovsky Brodsky Lorca Neruda Paz Seferis Seifert Herbert MacDiarmid R.S. Thomas Amichai 282
40 Poets Who Cross Boundaries Heaney Walcott Angelou Oliver Murray 289
Acknowledgements 296
Index 305