A Treasury of Favorite Poems

A Treasury of Favorite Poems celebrates the rich poetic legacy of America and England with more than 400 poems that span more than four centuries. The poets represented are acknowledged as among the world’s greatest: William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and more than fifty others.

In addition to a generous selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, this volume includes the complete text of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and such familiar classics as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

There are poems here to suit all moods an interests: love poems from Christopher Marlowe and Andrew Marvell; meditative poems including John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”; politically charged poems such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and William Butler Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”; nonsense verse from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll; poems of place such as Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; and poems of passion including Emily Bronte’s “No coward soul is mine” and selections from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. There are even celebrations of the Christmas holiday in Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and of America’s national pastime in Ernest Thayer’s whimsical “Casey at the Bat.”

For anyone who admires achievements in the poetic form and the skill with which poets capture in memorable phrases the emotions and experiences that speak to every reader, A Treasury of Favorite Poems is a bountiful collection of some of the world’s best-loved and most popular poetry.