This superb collection covers a period of three hundred years. Three-quarters of its space is deveoted to the poetry of the twentieth century, including a generous representation of the new and exciting works of the younger poets of the 1940s and 1950s. Traditional favorites like Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier are represented. But the richness of such major and more modern figures as Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, etc., given full scope by the inclusion of substantial selections from their work.