Brief and affordable, this pocket-sized anthology focus on the poems at a cost well under that of traditional anthologies.  Chronologically organized, the selections represent the full range of poetic tradition from popular ballads to contemporary work.  Diversity and flexibility are reflected in the selections by women and writers of color—representing over a third of the book—and by the inclusion of virtually every traditional poetic form used in English-language poetry.  Updates include twenty-five new selections from previously unrepresented poets, as well as different offerings from previously anthologized writers.  Contemporary poets new to this anthology include Joseph Harrison, Brian Turner, Allison Joseph, Sophie Hannah, and Emily Moore.  New poems represent poets ranging from Donne, Poe, Whitman, and Hardy, to modernists including Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Richard Wilbur. 

Table of Contents:
* asterisks indicate selections new to this edition   Introduction An Anecdote: Where Poetry Starts  Speaker, Listener, and Context  “The Star-Spangled Banner”  Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic  The Language of Poetry   Figurative Language  Allegory and Symbol  Tone of Voice  Repetition: Sounds and Schemes  Meter and Rhythm  Free Verse, Open Form and Closed Forms Stanza Forms  Fixed Forms  A Brief Note: Literary History, Poetic Conventions, and Theory   Writing about Poetry   Poetry  Anonymous             Western Wind             Bonny Barbara Allan             Sir Patrick Spens  Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542)             They Flee from Me              Whoso List to Hunt  Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)             Amoretti: Sonnet 75  Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)             Astrophel and Stella: Sonnet 1  Robert Southwell (1561?-1595)             The Burning Babe  Michael Drayton (1563-1631)             Idea: Sonnet 61  William Shakespeare (1564-1616)             Sonnet 18             Sonnet 20             Sonnet 29             Sonnet 73             Sonnet 116             Sonnet 129             Sonnet 130             When Daisies Pied (Spring and Winter)  Thomas Campion (1567-1620)             There Is a Garden in Her Face  John Donne (1572-1631)             The Flea             Holy Sonnet 10             Holy Sonnet 14              * The Sun Rising             A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning  Ben Jonson (1573-1637)             On My First Son             Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount  Mary Wroth (1587?-1651?)             In This Strange Labyrinth How Shall I Turn  Robert Herrick (1591-1674)             To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time  George Herbert (1593-1633)             Easter Wings             Love (III)             The Pulley             Redemption  Edmund Waller (1606-1687)             Song  John Milton (1608-1674)             How Soon Hath Time             On the Late Massacre in Piedmont             When I Consider How My Light Is Spent  Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)             The Author to Her Book  Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)             To Lucasta, Going to the Wars  Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)             To His Coy Mistress  John Dryden (1631-1700)             To the Memory of Mr. Oldham  Edward Taylor (1642-1729)             Huswifery  Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)             A Description of a City Shower  Alexander Pope (1688-1744)             from An Essay on Criticism             Ode on Solitude  Thomas Gray (1716-1771)             Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard  William Blake (1757-1827)             The Chimney Sweeper             The Little Black Boy             A Poison Tree             The Tyger  Robert Burns (1759-1796)             A Red, Red Rose             John Barleycorn  William Wordsworth (1770-1850)             I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud             It Is a Beauteous Evening             Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room             Ode: Intimations of Immortality  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)             Frost at Midnight             Kubla Khan             Work Without Hope  George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)             She Walks in Beauty             Stanzas             When We Two Parted  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)             Ode to the West Wind             Ozymandias  William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)             To the Fringed Gentian  John Keats (1795-1821)             La Belle Dame sans Merci             Ode to a Nightingale             On First Looking into Chapman's Homer             When I Have Fears  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)             Sonnets from the Portuguese, 18             Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)             The Arsenal at Springfield             The Cross of Snow  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)            The Haunted Palace              The Raven               *Sonnet: To Science Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)             The Eagle The Lady of Shalott             Tears, Idle Tears             Ulysses  Robert Browning (1812-1889)             My Last Duchess             Porphyria's Lover             * Prospice Walt Whitman (1819-1892)             A Noiseless Patient Spider             O Captain, My Captain             * A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim             *Song of Myself, 1             *Song of Myself, 5             Song of Myself, 6             Song of Myself, 11             *Song of Myself, 21             *Song of Myself, 32             *Song of Myself, 47             *Song of Myself, 52             When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)             Dover Beach  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)            After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes             Because I Could Not Stop for Death             *The Brain Is Wider than the Sky             I Felt a Funeral in My Brain              Much Madness is Divinest Sense             A Narrow Fellow in the Grass             Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church             The Soul Selects Her Own Society             *Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant             There’s a Certain Slant of Light             Wild Nights--Wild Nights  Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)             UpHill  Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)             Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?             * Channel Firing             * The Man He Killed             Neutral Tones             The Ruined Maid  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)             God's Grandeur             Pied Beauty             Spring and Fall: To a Young Child   Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)             The New Colossus  A. E. Housman (1859-1936)             Eight O'Clock             Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now             Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall             “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff . . .”  William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)             The Lake Isle of Innisfree             Leda and the Swan             Sailing to Byzantium             The Second Coming             The Song of Wandering Aengus Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)             Firelight             Eros Turannos             The Mill             Richard Cory  Stephen Crane (1871-1900)             The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers             The Wayfarer  Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)             We Wear the Mask  Robert Frost (1874-1963)             Acquainted with the Night             After ApplePicking             Design             Home Burial             The Need of Being Versed in Country Things             The Road Not Taken             Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening  Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1034)             Amaze             Languor after Pain             Trapped  Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)             Anecdote of the Jar             Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock             The Emperor of Ice-Cream             The Snow Man             Sunday Morning             The Worms at Heavens Gate  William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)             The Last Words of My English Grandmother             The Red Wheelbarrow             Spring and All  Ezra Pound (1885-1972)             In a Station of the Metro             Portrait d'une Femme             The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter  Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)             Let No Charitable Hope             Ophelia  H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)             Pear Tree             Sea Rose  Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)             Dreamers  Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)             The Purse-Seine  Marianne Moore (1887-1972)             The Fish             Silence  T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)             Journey of the Magi             The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock             Preludes  John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)           Piazza Piece  Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)             If I Should Learn, in Some Quite Casual Way             Oh, Oh, You Will Be Sorry for that Word             What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why  Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)             Dulce et Decorum Est  e. e. cummings (1894-1962)             nobody loses all the time             pity this busy monster,manunkind              * plato told             r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r  Jean Toomer (1894-1967)             Georgia Dusk  Louise Bogan (1897-1970)             Women  Hart Crane (1899-1933)             Chaplinesque  Langston Hughes (1902-1967)             Dream Boogie             Theme for English B             The Weary Blues Stevie Smith (1902-1971)             *Our Bog Is Dood  Countee Cullen (1903-1946)             Incident             Yet Do I Marvel  A. D. Hope (1907-2000)             Imperial Adam  W. H. Auden (1907-1973)             As I Walked Out One Evening             Musée des Beaux Arts             The Unknown Citizen  Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)             Dolor             My Papa's Waltz             Root Cellar  Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)             The Fish            Sestina              One Art  Robert Hayden (1913-1980)             Those Winter Sundays   Dudley Randall (1914-2000)             Ballad of Birmingham  William Stafford (1914-1993)             Traveling through the Dark  Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)             Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night             * Poem in October  Weldon Kees (1914-1955)             For My Daughter  Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)             * 8th Air Force             The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner  Margaret Walker (1915-1998)             For Malcolm X  Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)             the ballad of chocolate Mabbie             the mother             We Real Cool  Robert Lowell (1917-1977)             For the Union Dead  Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)             A Coney Island of the Mind, #15  May Swenson (1919-1989)             How Everything Happens  Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)             A Primer of the Daily Round Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)             Junk             Altitudes             The Writer             Year's End  Philip Larkin (1922-1985)             Next, Please             This Be the Verse             * The Whitsun Weddings  James Dickey (1923-1997)             The Heaven of Animals  Alan Dugan (1923-2003)             Love Song: I and Thou  Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)             * The Dover Bitch             Third Avenue in Sunlight Daniel Hoffman (b. 1923)             As I Was Going to Saint-Ives  Denise Levertov (1923-1999)             The Ache of Marriage  Louis Simpson (b. 1923)             American Classic             My Father in the Night Commanding No  Vassar Miller (1924-1997)             Subterfuge  Donald Justice (b. 1925)             Counting the Mad  Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)             The Ungrateful Garden             From“Pro Femina” Three   Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)             Noted in the New York Times  Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)             A Supermarket in California  James Merrill (1926-1995)             Casual Wear  Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)             The Day Lady Died  W. D. Snodgrass (b. 1926)             Mementos, I  John Ashbery (b. 1927)             Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape             Paradoxes and Oxymorons  W. S. Merwin (b. 1927)             For the Anniversary of My Death             The Last One  James Wright (1927-1980)             Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio             Saint Judas  Philip Levine (b. 1928)             You Can Have It  Anne Sexton (1928-1974)             Cinderella             The Truth the Dead Know   Thom Gunn (b. 1929)             From the Wave             Terminal  X. J. Kennedy (b. 1929)             In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day            * Little Elegy  Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)             Aunt Jennifer's Tigers             Diving into the Wreck             Rape  Ted Hughes (b. 1930-1998)             Pike  Gary Snyder (b. 1930)             A Walk  Derek Walcott (b. 1930)             Central America  Miller Williams (b. 1930)             The Book  Linda Pastan (b. 1932)             Ethics  Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)             Daddy             Edge             Metaphors  Gerald Barrax (b. 1933)             Strangers like Us: Pittsburgh, Raleigh, 1945-1985  Mark Strand (b. 1934)             The Tunnel Lewis Turco (b. 1934)             *The Premonition  Russel Edson (b. 1935)             Ape  Mary Oliver (b. 1935)             The Black Walnut Tree         *   Honey on the Table  Fred Chappell (b. 1936)             Narcissus and Echo  Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)             homage to my hips             wishes for sons  Marge Piercy (b. 1936)             What’s That Smell in the Kitchen!  Betty Adcock (b. 1938)             Voyages  Gary Gildner (b. 1938)             First Practice  Robert Phillips (b. 1938)             * The Stone Crab: A Love Poem  Dabney Stuart (b. 1938)             Discovering My Daughter  Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)             Siren Song  Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)             The Sacred  Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)             Digging             Punishment  * Clive James (b. 1959)             After the Storm  Ted Kooser (b. 19390             *Abandoned Farmhouse  Tom Disch (b. 1940)             Ballade of the New God  Florence Cassen Mayers (b. 1940)             All American Sestina  Pattiann Rogers (b. 1940)             Foreplay  Billy Collins (b. 1941)             Litany             Paradelle for Susan   Robert Hass (b. 1941)             * Meditation at Lagunitas  Simon J. Ortiz (b. 1941)             The Serenity in Stones  Gibbons Ruark (b. 1941)             The Visitor  Gladys Cardiff (b. 1942)             Combing  B.H. Fairchild (b. 1942)             Body and Soul  Charles Martin (b. 1942)             E.S.L.  Sharon Olds (b. 1942)             The One Girl at the Boys Party Henry Taylor (b. 1942)             From Brief Candles  Diane Lockward (b. 1943)             My Husband Discovers Poetry  Ellen Bryant Voight (b. 1943)             Daughter  Robert Morgan (b. 1944)             Mountain Bride  Craig Raine (b. 1944)             A Martian Sends a Postcard Home  Enid Shomer (b. 1944)             Women Bathing at Bergen Belsen  Wendy Cope (b. 1944)             Rondeau Redoublé  Dick Davis (b. 1945)             A Monorhyme for the Shower  Kay Ryan (b. 1945)             Bestiary  Leon Stokesbury (b. 1945)             The Day Kennedy Died  *John Whitworth (b. 1945)             The Examiners  Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946)             The Ballad of Aunt Geneva  Ai (b. 1947)             Child Beater  Jim Hall (b. 1947)             Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too  Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)             Facing It R.S. Gwynn (b. 1948)             Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses an Anthology of Poetry  Timothy Steele (b. 1948)             Sapphics Against Anger  James Fenton (b. 1949)             God, a Poem  Sarah Cortez (b. 1950)             Tu Negrito  Carolyn Forché (b. 1950)             The Colonel  Dana Gioia (b. 1950)             Planting a Sequoia  Rodney Jones (b. 1950)             Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.  Timothy Murphy (b. 1950)             Case Notes  Joy Harjo (b. 1951)             She Had Some Horses  Andrew Hudgins (b. 1951)             Air View of an Industrial Scene Robert Wrigley (b. 1951)             Thatcher Bitchboy  Judith Ortiz Cofer (b. 1952)             The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica  Rita Dove (b. 1952)              * American Smooth  Mark Jarman (b. 1952)             After Disappointment  Julie Kane (b. 19520             Alan Doll Rap  Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)             The Traveling Onion  Alberto Ríos (b. 1952)             The Purpose of Altar Boys  Julia Alvarez (b. 1953)             Bilingual Sestina  Harryette Mullen (b. 1953)             Dim Lady  Michael Donaghy (b. 1953)             The River in Spate  Kim Addonizio (b. 1954)             Sonnenizio on a Line by Millay  David Mason (b. 1954)            *  Fog Horns  Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954)             Welcome to Hiroshima  Cathy Song (b. 1955)             Stamp Collecting  Ginger Andrews (b. 1956)             Primping in the Rearview Mirror Annie Finch (b. 1956)             Coy Mistress  *Joseph Harrison b. 1957)             Air Larry April Lindner (b. 1962)             First Kiss  Catherine Tufariello (b. 1963)             Useful Advice  Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)             The Exaggeration of Despair  Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966)             *Domestic Work, 1937  *Brian Turner (b. 1967)             Here. Bullet  Allison Joseph (b. 1967)             The Athlete  Suji Kwock Kim (b. 1968)             Occupation  A. E. Stallings (b. 1968)             *First Love: A Quiz Joshua Mehigan (b. 1969)             Riddle  Beth Ann Fennelly (b. 1971)             Asked for a Happy Memory of her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field   Sophie Hannah (b. 1971)             The Guest Speaker  Emily Moore (b. 1977)             Auld Lang Syne