Whether you’re intimidated by couplets or you recite Robert Frost in your sleep, this abridged anthology of the top 100 poems of all time — selected by over 1,000 experts — is a necessary guide to the classics! An ensemble cast takes you through these famous verses and provides historical context and textual analysis to better understand each work.

Here in one volume are the top one hundred poems, as determined by a survey of more than 1,000 anthologies—the poems in English most frequently anthologized, the poems with the broadest, most enduring appeal. From Shakespeare to Dickinson to Frost, from sonnets to odes to villanelles, William Harmon's Classic Hundred Poems offers a feast for poetry lovers.

This edition updates the first by presenting the new top one hundred poems, nineteen of which were not in the first edition. The revised edition is arranged chronologically, and features new commentary and notes on verse form, as well as an index of the poems in order of popularity, notes on words and proper names, and a bibliography for each poet and each poem. A glossary of terms, author index, and index of titles and first lines are also included.

From Keats' "To Autumn," now ranked as the number-one poem in this collection, to George Herbert's "Virtue," in the hundredth spot, every poem is illuminated by Harmon's informative notes. With insights into the historical period in which each poem was written, the verse form used, and connections among poems, this is the ideal introduction to poetry, as well as a treasury for the dedicated poetry lover.

An anthology every poetry lover should have: 100 carefully selected and beautifully read poems. Works included from the following authors:
▪ Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) ▪ Sir Walter Raleigh (1554?-1618) ▪ Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) ▪ Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) ▪ William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ▪ John Donne (1572-1631) ▪ Ben Jonson (1572-1637) ▪ Robert Herrick (1591-1674) ▪ George Herbert (1593-1633) ▪ Thomas Carew (1595-1639?) ▪ Edmund Waller (1606-1687) ▪ John Milton (1608-1674) ▪ Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) ▪ Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) ▪ Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) ▪ Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) ▪ Thomas Gray (1716-1771) ▪ William Blake (1757-1827) ▪ Robert Burns (1759-1796) ▪ William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ▪ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ▪ George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ▪ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) ▪ John Keats (1795-1821) ▪ Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) ▪ Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) ▪ Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) ▪ Robert Browning (1812-1889) ▪ Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) ▪ Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) ▪ Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) ▪ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) ▪ Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) ▪ Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) ▪ Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) ▪ W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) ▪ Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) ▪ Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) ▪ Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) ▪ Robert Frost (1874-1963) ▪ T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) ▪ Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) ▪ W.H. Auden (1907-1973) ▪ Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) ▪ Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) ▪ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)