Here, for the first time, is our generations' definitive view of the greatest poetry in the English language. This is the story of poetry in English, a collection of the best 500 poems, based not on one critic's choice, not on one poet's choice, but on the collective choice of 550 critics, editors, and poets.

Here are the 500 poems that speak to us across the centuries, beginning with Chaucer's words, moving to Shakespeare's masterpieces, through Donne's wonderful witticisms and Pope's elegant satires, through the perennial favorites of Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, on through Dickinson's jewels of profundity to the ironies of Eliot and to the passion of Plath and Ginsberg in out own time. These are the 500 poems we know or want to know, arranged as an unfolding story of great literature, with comments on each by William Harmon and with a general introduction on the entire collection.

Contents:

• This is It!
• Anonymous:
  • Cuckoo Song
• Geoffrey Chaucer
  • General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
• Anonymous
  • Sir Patrick Spens
  • Western Wind
  • Edward, Edward
  • Thomas the Rhymer
  • The Wife of Usher's Well
  • As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham
  • Corpus Christi Carol
  • The Three Ravens
  • Tom o' Bedlam's Song
  • Adam Lay I-bounden
  • Lord Randall
  • The Cherry-Tree Carol
  • The Lord Is My Shepherd
  • I Sing of a Maiden
  • A Lyke-Wake Dirge
  • My Love in Her Attire
  • The Demon Lover
  • Weep No More, Sad Fountains
  • The Unquiet Grave
  • Waly, Waly
• Robin Skelton
  • To Mistress Margret Hussey
• Sir Thomas Wyatt
  • They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek
  • The Lover Complaineth the Unkindness of His Love
  • Whoso List to Hunt
• Sir Walter Raleigh
  • The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
  • The Lie
  • Even Such Is Time
  • The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
• Edmund Spenser
  • One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand
  • Prothalamion
• Sir Philip Sydney
  • With How Sad Steps, O Moon, Thou Clim'st the Skies!
  • Leave Me, O Love, Which Reachest But to Dust
  • My True Love Hath My Heart
  • Loving in Truth, and Fain in Verse My Love to Show
  • Come Sleep? O Sleep, the Certain Knot of Peace
• George Peele
  • His Golden Locks Time Hath to Silver Turned
  • Whenas the Rye Reach the Chin
• Robert Southwell
  • The Burning Babe
• Samuel Daniel
  • Care-Charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night
• Michael Drayton
  • Since There's No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part
• Christopher Marlowe
  • The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
• William Shakespeare
  • That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold
  • Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
  • Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
  • Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun
  • When Icicles Hang by the Wall
  • Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
  • When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought
  • O Mistress Mine
  • The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame
  • When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes
  • When Daisies Pied
  • It Was a Lover and His Lass
  • My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun
  • Poor Soul, the Center of My Sinful Earth
  • Hark! Hark! the Lark
  • Take, O Take Those Lips Away
  • Farewell! Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing
  • Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I
  • When That I Was and a Tiny Little Boy
  • Full Many a Glorious Morning Have I Seen
  • No Longer Mourn for Me When I Am Dead
  • Tired With All These, for Restful Death I Cry
  • Like as the Waves Make towards the Pebbled Shore
  • When Daffodils Begin to Peer
  • How like a Winter Hath My Absence Been
  • Since Brass, nor Stone, nor Earth, nor Boundless Sea
  • Come Away, Come Away Death
  • Come Unto These Yellow Sands
  • Tell Me Where Is Fansy Bred
• Thomas Campion
  • My Sweetest Lesbia
  • Rose-cheeked Laura
  • There is a Garden in Her Face
  • Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes in the Air
• Thomas Nashe
  • Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss
  • Spring, the Sweet Spring
• Chidiock Tichborne
  • Tichborne's Elegy
• Sir Henry Wotton
  • On His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia
• John Donne
  • Death, Be Not Proud
  • Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God
  • The Good Morrow
  • At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners
  • Go and Catch a Falling Star
  • The Sun Rising
  • A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
  • A Hymn to God the Father
  • The Ecstasy
  • The Canonization
  • The Flea
  • Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
  • Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go
  • A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day
  • The Funeral
  • The Apparition
  • The Relic
  • Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
  • The Anniversary
• Ben Jonson
  • Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
  • On My First Son
  • Hymn to Diana
  • Still to Be Neat
  • The Triumph of Charis
  • Epitaph on S.P.
  • Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount, Keep Time with My Salt Tears
  • Come, My Celia, Let Us Prove
  • To Penshurst
• John Webster
  • Call for the Robin Redbreast and the Wren
• William Browne
  • On the Countess Dowager of Pembroke
• Robert Herrick
  • To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
  • Upon Julia's Clothes
  • Delight in Disorder
  • To Daffodils
  • The Argument of his Book
  • Corinna's Going a-Maying
  • The Night-Piece to Julia
  • Grace for a Child
• Henry King, Bishop of Chichester
  • Exequy on His Wife
• George Herbert
  • Love Bade Me Welcome
  • The Collar
  • Virtue
  • The Pulley
  • Redemption
  • Easter Wings
  • Jordan
  • Prayer the Church's Banquet
• Thomas Carew
  • Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows
  • To My Inconstant Mistress
• Sir William Davenant
  • The Lark Now Leaves His Watery Nest
• Edmund Waller
  • Go, Lovely Rose
  • On a Girdle
• John Milton
  • Lycidas
  • On His Deceased Wife
  • On His Blindness
  • On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
  • L'Allegro
  • Il Penseroso
• Sir John Suckling
  • Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?
• Anne Bradstreet
  • To My Dear and Loving Husband
• Richard Lovelace
  • To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
  • To Althea, from Prison
  • The Grasshopper
• Andrew Marvell
  • To His Coy Mistress
  • The Garden
  • The Definition of Love
  • Bermudas
  • An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland
  • The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers
  • The Mower to the Glow-Worms
  • A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body
• Henry Vaughan
  • The Retreat
  • The World
  • They are All Gone into the World of Light
  • Peace
  • The Night
• John Dryden
  • To the Memory of Mr. Oldham
  • Mac Flecknoe
  • A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
  • Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Music
• Edward Taylor
  • Huswifery
• Jonathan Swift
  • A Description of the Morning
• Alexander Pope
  • Know Then Thyself
  • Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
  • An Essay on Criticism
• Samuel Johnson
  • A Short Song of Congratulation
  • On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic
  • The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated
• Thomas Gray
  • Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
  • Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
• William Collins
  • Ode to Evening
  • How Sleep the Brave
• Oliver Goldsmith
  • When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly
  • An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
  • The Deserted Village
• William Cowper
  • Light Shining out of Darkness
  • The Poplar Field
• Philip Freneau
  • The Indian Burying Ground
• William Blake
  • The Tyger
  • London
  • And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time
  • Piping Down the Vallys Wild
  • The Sick Rose
  • The Lamb
  • Ah! Sun-Flower
  • Hear the Voice of the Bard
  • Auguries of Innocence
  • How Sweet I Roam'd from Field to Field
  • The Little Black Boy
  • A Poison Tree
  • The Chimney Sweeper
  • To the Evening Star
  • The Garden of Love
  • The Clod and the Pebble
  • Holy Thursday
  • Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau
• Robert Burns
  • A Red, Red Rose
  • To a Mouse on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough
  • John Anderson, My Jo
  • The Banks o' Doon
  • For A' That and A' That
  • Holy Willie's Prayer
• William Wordsworth
  • The World Is Too Much with Us
  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
  • Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,1802
  • The Solitary Reaper
  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
  • Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
  • Lucy (comprising):
    • She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
    • I Traveled among Unknown Men
    • Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known
    • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower
    • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
  • It is a Beauteous Evening
  • London,1802
  • My Heart Leaps Up
  • Surprised by Joy
  • She Was a Phantom of Delight
  • Resolution and Independence
• Sir Walter Scott
  • Proud Maisie
  • Breathes There the Man with Soul So Dead
  • Lochinvar
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Kubla Khan
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  • Dejection: An Ode
  • Frost at Midnight
• Robert Southey
  • The Battle of Blenheim
• Walter Savage Landor
  • Rose Aylmer
  • Dirce
  • I Strove with None, for None Was Worth My Strife
  • Past Ruined Ilion Helen Lives
• Thomas Campbell
  • Hohenlinden
• Clement Clarke Moore
  • A Visit from Saint Nicholas
• Leigh Hunt
  • Jenny Kissed Me
  • Abou Ben Adhem
• George Gordon Noel Byron
  • So We'll Go No More A-Roving
  • She Walks in Beauty
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • When We Two Parted
  • The Ocean
  • There Was a Sound of Revelry by Night
• Charles Wolfe
  • The Burial of Sir John Moore After Corunna
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • Ozymandias
  • Ode to the West Wind
  • To a Skylark
  • Music, When Soft Voices Die
  • To Night
  • England in 1819
  • To____
  • Adonais
• John Clare
  • I Am
• William Cullen Bryant
  • To a Waterfall
  • Thanatopsis
• John Keats
  • To Autumn
  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci
  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci (revised version)
  • On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
  • Ode to a Nightingale
  • Ode on a Grecian Urn
  • When I Have Fears
  • Ode on Melancholy
  • The Eve of St. Agnes
  • Bright Star
  • Ode to Psyche
• Thomas Hood
  • I Remember, I Remember
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes
  • Old Adam, the Carrion Crow
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Concord Hymn
  • The Snow-Storm
  • The Rhodora
  • Brahma
  • Fable
  • Days
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • My Lost Youth
  • Paul Revere's Ride
  • Chaucer
• John Greenleaf Whittier
  • Barbara Frietchie
  • Snow-Bound; A Winter Idyl
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful "One-Hoss Shay"
  • The Chambered Nautilus
  • Old Ironsides
• Edgar Allan Poe
  • To Helen
  • The Raven
  • Annabel Lee
  • The City in the Sea
  • The Bells
  • The Haunted Palace
• Alfred Tennyson
  • The Splendor Falls
  • Break, Break, Break
  • Crossing the Bar
  • Ulysses
  • The Eagle
  • Tears, Idle Tears
  • Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
  • The Charge of the Light Brigade
  • Mariana
  • The Lady of Shalott
  • Flower in the Crannied Wall
• Robert Browning
  • My Last Duchess
  • Home Thoughts from Abroad
  • Meeting at Night
  • The Year's at the Spring
  • The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church
  • Parting at Morning
  • Two in the Campagna
• Edward Lear
  • The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
  • The Jumblies
• Emily Bronte
  • Remembrance
• Arthur Hugh Clough
  • Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
  • The Latest Decalogue
• Julia Ward Howe
  • The Battle-Hymn of the Republic
• Walt Whitman
  • A Noiseless Patient Spider
  • O Captain! My Captain!
  • When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
  • I Hear America Singing
  • Cavalry Crossing a Ford
• Matthew Arnold
  • Dover Beach
  • The Scholar-Gypsy
• William Allingham
  • The Fairies
• George Meredith
  • Lucifer in Starlight
  • Thus Piteously Love Closed What He Begat
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  • The Blessed Damozel
  • The Woodspurge
• Emily Dickinson
  • Because I could not stop for Death
  • I heard a Fly buzz-when I died
  • A narrow Fellow in the Grass
  • There's a certain Slant of light
  • A Bird came down the Walk
  • The Soul selects her own Society
  • I like to see it lap the Miles
  • My life closed twice before its close
  • Success is countest sweetest
  • I taste a liquor never brewed
  • After great pain, a formal feeling comes
  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
  • I never saw a Moor
  • Much Madness is divinest Sense
• Christina Georgina Rossetti
  • When I Am Dead
  • Up-Hill
  • A Birthday
  • Remember
• Lewis Carroll
  • Jabberwocky
  • The Walrus and the Carpenter
  • Father William
  • I'll Tell Thee Everything I Can
  • How Doth the Little Crocodile
• Sir William Schwenck Gilbert
  • The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
  • When the Hounds of Spring are on Winter's Traces
  • The Garden of Proserpine
• Thomas Hardy
  • The Darkling Thrush
  • The Oxen
  • In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"
  • Channel Firing
  • Afterwards
  • The Convergence of the Twain
  • The Man He Killed
  • Neutral Tones
  • The Ruined Voice
  • The Maid
  • During Wind and Rain
• Robert Bridges
  • London Snow
  • Nightingales
• Gerard Manly Hopkins
  • Pied Beauty
  • The Windhover
  • God's Grandeur
  • Spring and Fall
  • Felix Randal
  • No Worst, There Is None
  • Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
  • Spring
  • Heaven-Haven
  • Inversnaid
  • The Habit of Perfection
  • Carrion Comfort
• Eugene Field
  • Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
  • The Duel
• Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Requiem
• Edwin Markham
  • The Man With the Hoe
• Oscar Wilde
  • The Ballad of Reading Gaol
• Alfred Edward Housman
  • Loveliest of Trees
  • To an Athlete Dying Young
  • With Rue My Heart Is Laden
  • When I Was One-and-Twenty
  • Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
  • Into My Heart an Air That Kills
  • On Wenlock Edge
• Francis Thompson
  • The Hound of Heaven
• Rudyard Kipling
  • Recessional
  • Danny Deever
• William Butler Yeats
  • The Second Coming
  • Sailing to Byzantium
  • Leda and the Swan
  • The Lake Isle of Innisfree
  • When You Are Old
  • Among School Children
  • An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
  • Easter, 1916
  • The Wild Swans at Coole
  • The Circus Animals' Desertion
  • A Prayer for My Daughter
  • Lapis Lazuli
  • The Song of Wandering Aengus
  • No Second Troy
• Gelett Burgess
  • The Purple Cow
• Ernest Dowson
  • Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae
  • Vita Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam
• Edgar Lee Masters
  • Anne Rutledge
• Edwin Arlington Robinson
  • Mr. Flood's Party
  • Miniver Cheevy
  • Richard Corey
  • Eros Turannos
  • For a Dead Lady
  • Luke Havergal
• William Henry Davies
  • Leisure
• Walter de la Mare
  • The Listeners
• Robert Frost
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
  • Mending Wall
  • Fire and Ice
  • The Road Not Taken
  • Birches
  • After Apple-Picking
  • Acquainted with the Night
  • Provide, Provide
  • The Gift Outright
  • Directive
  • Design
• John Masefield
  • Cargoes
• Carl Sandburg
  • Chicago
  • Fog
  • Cool Tombs
  • Grass
• Edward Thomas
  • The Owl
• Vachel Lindsay
  • Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
• Wallace Stevens
  • Sunday Morning
  • Anecdote of the Jar
  • The Emperor of Ice-Cream
  • The Idea of Order at Key West
  • Peter Quince at the Clavier
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
• William Carlos Williams
  • The Red Wheelbarrow
  • The Dance
  • Spring and All
  • The Yachts
• David Herbert Lawrence
  • Piano
  • Snake
  • Bavarian Gentians
• Ezra Pound
  • The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
  • In the Station of the Metro
• Rupert Brooke
  • The Soldier
• Robinson Jeffers
  • Hurt Hawks
  • Shine, Perishing Republic
• Marianne Moore
  • Poetry
  • A Grave
• Dame Edith Sitwell
  • Still Falls the Rain
• Thomas Stearns Eliot
  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  • Journey of the Magi
  • The Waste Land
  • Sweeney Among the Nightingales
  • Gerontion
  • Little Gidding
• John Crowe Ransom
  • Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter
  • Piazza Piece
• Claude McKay
  • If We Must Die
• Isaac Rosenberg
  • Break of Day in the Trenches
• Archibald MacLeish
  • You, Andrew Marvell
  • Ars Poetica
  • The End of the World
• Wilfred Owen
  • Anthem for Doomed Youth
  • Dulce et Decorum Est
  • Strange Meeting
  • Greater Love
• Edward Estlin Cummings
  • anyone lived in a pretty how town
  • "next to of course god america i"
• Hart Crane
  • To Brooklyn Bridge
• Allen Tate
  • Ode to the Confederate Dead
• Langston Hughes
  • The Negro Speaks of Rivers
• Stevie Smith
  • Not Waving But Drowning
• Richard Eberhart
  • The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
  • The Groundhog
• Wystan Hugh Auden
  • Musee des Beaux Arts
  • In Memory of W.B. Yeats
  • Lullaby
• Louise MacNeice
  • Bagpipe Music
• Theodore Roethke
  • My Papa's Waltz
  • I Knew a Woman
  • The Waking
  • Elegy for June
  • In a Dark Time
• Sir Stephen Spender
  • I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great
• Elizabeth Bishop
  • The Fish
• Robert Hayden
  • Those Winter Sundays
• Randall Jarrell
  • The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
• Henry Reed
  • Naming of Parts
• Dylan Thomas
  • Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
  • Fern Hill
  • A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
  • The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
• Gwendolyn Brooks
  • We Real Cool
• Robert Lowell
  • Skunk Hour
  • For the Union Dead
  • Mr. Edwards and the Spider
• Richard Wilbur
  • Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
• Philip Larkin
  • Church Going
• Allen Ginsberg
  • A Supermarket in California
• Sylvia Plath
  • Daddy