A little history of poetry

Gods, heroes and monsters : 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' --

War, adventure, love : Homer, Sappho --

Latin classics : Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal --

Anglo-Saxon poetry : 'Beowulf', laments and riddles --

Continental masters of the Middle Ages : Dante, Daniel, Petrarch, Villon --

A European poet : Chaucer --

Poets of the seen world and the unseen : The Gawain poet, Hafez, Langland --

Tudor Court poets : Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser --

Elizabethan love poets : Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney --

Copernicus in poetry : John Donne --

An age of individualism : Jonson, Herrick, Marvell --

Religious individualists : Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne --

Poetry from the world beyond : John Milton --

The Augustan age : Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith --

The other Eighteenth Century : Montagu, Egerton, Finch, Tollet, Leapor, Yearsley, Barbauld, Blamire, Baillie, Wheatley, Duck, Clare, Thomson, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, Smart --

Communal poetry : Popular ballads and hymns --

'Lyrical Ballads', and after : Wordsworth and Coleridge --

Second-generation romantics : Keats and Shelley --

Romantic eccentrics : Blake, Byron, Burns --

From Romanticism to Modernism in German poetry : Goethe, Heine, Rilke --

Making Russian literature : Pushkin, Lermontov --

Great Victorians : Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold --

Reform, resolve and religion : Victorian women poets : Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti --

American revolutionaries : Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson --

Shaking the foundations : Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, Dylan Thomas, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Swinburne, Katharine Harris Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Charlotte Mew, Oscar Wilde --

New voices at the end of an era : Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Hopkins --

The Georgian poets : Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Davies, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, W.W. Gibson, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence --

Poetry of the First World War : Stadler, Toller, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, Cole, Cannan, Sinclair, McCrae --

The great escapist : W.B. Yeats --

Inventing Modernism : Eliot, Pound --

West meets East : Waley, Pound, the Imagists --

American Modernists : Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Esther Popel, Helene Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes --

Getting over Modernism : Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop --

The Thirties poets : Auden, Spender, MacNeice --

Poetry of the Second World War : Douglas, Lewis, Keyes, Fuller, Ross, Causley, Reed, Simpson, Shapiro, Wilbur, Jarrell, Pudney, Ewart, Sitwell, Feinstein, Stanley-Wrench, Clark --

American confessional poets, and others : Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, Roethke --

The movement poets and associates : Larkin, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Betjeman, Stevie Smith --

Fatal attractions : Hughes, Plath --

Poets in politics : Tagore, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Brodsky, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Seferis, Seifert, Herbert, MacDiarmid, R.S. Thomas, Amichai --

Poets who cross boundaries : Heaney, Walcott, Angelou, Oliver, Murray

Acknowledgements

Index.