"The perfect introduction to the beauty and power of American poetry, these twenty-five works celebrate the diverse backgrounds and voices that together make up a nation... Best-loved works by the most important American poets of the last two centuries are included here, alongside stunning works by lesser-known, but equally brilliant, writers"--from page [4] of cover.

''A sonnet is a moment's monument, '' said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets. The sonnets in this collection - whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair or celebration - reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines. Here are classics such as Milton's ''On His Blindness'', Yeats's ''Leda and the Swan'' and Frost's ''The Oven Bird'', juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke's ''Sonnet Reversed'', the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn's ''Caring for Surfaces'' and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin's ''To Failure''. From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring. This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

Offers thirty-two poems about animals by various poets, including Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and Vicki Hearne. The writers include Blake, Dickinson, Tennyson, Yeats, Wordsworth, and Keats. The captivating paintings by Simona Mulazanni make every page a delight. And the subject, animals, big and small, wild and tame has an irresistible appeal to children. William Blake's The Tyger burns bright in the lush image that accompanies the verse. Hillaire Belloc pays tribute to an elephant in a short, witty stanza accompanied by an adorable picture of the creature sitting on a small wood stool. Among the other poems are Marianne Moore's A Jellyfish and Edward Lear's charming, songlike The Owl and the Pussycat. A Selection of Scholastic Book Clubs, John Hollander has written A Crackling of Thorns (chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets), as well as literary criticism and children's books. He has served as editor for many poetry collections, among them An Anthology of Poems for Young People (with Harold Bloom). He is currently the Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Simona Mulazanni is a successful and much loved children?s book artist in Italy.

"In this essay on 'what the imagination has made of the phenomenon of echo, ' the author examines certain aspects of the figure of echo in light of their significance for poetry. Looking at echo in its literal, acoustic sense, echo in myth, and echo as literary allusion, Mr. Hollander concludes with a study of the rhetorical status of the figure of echo, and the ancient and newly interesting trope of metalepsis, or transumption, which it appears to embody. Centered on ways by which Milton's poetry echoes, and is echoed by, other texts, The Figure of Echo deals well with Spencer and other Renaissance writers, with romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and with echoes of their nineteenth-century forebears in such modern poets as Hardy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams and Hart Crane."--Front dust jacket inside flap.

The title poem is interwoven with a varied collection of lyrics, narratives, puzzles, and translations

An anthology of poems, most of them by English poets of earlier centuries, which reflect the symbolic overtones and moods of the seasons.