Contents

• Introduction / Robert Pinsky
• From "Discordants" (1) / Conrad Aiken
• The sentence / Anna Akhmatova
• The great canzon / Dante Alighieri
• Inside the apple / Yehuda Amichai
• In memoriam Mae Noblitt / A. R. Ammons
• A blessing in disguise / John Ashbery
• This room / John Ashbery
• It is dangerous to read newspapers / Margaret Atwood
• Lullaby / W. H. Auden
• The more loving one / W. H. Auden
• L’invitation au voyage / Charles Baudelaire
• Enueg 1 / Samuel Beckett
• Enueg 2 / Samuel Beckett
• From "Eleven addresses to our Lord" (3, 4) / John Berryman
• At the fishhouses / Elizabeth Bishop
• A cold spring / Elizabeth Bishop
• Some dreams they forgot / Elizabeth Bishop
• The chimney sweeper (from Songs of innocence) / William Blake
• The garden of love (from Songs of experience) / William Blake
• The crows / Louise Bogan
• Dark summer / Louise Bogan
• The blossom / Eavan Boland - - We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks
• When you have forgotten Sunday : the love story / Gwendolyn Brooks
• Strong men / Sterling A. Brown
• Two in the Campagna / Robert Browning
• Ay, ay, ay de la Grifa Negra / Julia de Burgos
• Is there for honest poverty / Robert Burns
• John Anderson my Jo / Robert Burns
• Deathfugue / Paul Celan
• The Negro’s complaint / William Cowper
• Sunday morning apples / Hart Crane
• For a poet / Countee Cullen
• Song in spite of myself / Countee Cullen
• I carry your heart with me … / E. E. Cummings
• Ample make this bed / Emily Dickinson
• The grass so little has to do / Emily Dickinson
• I’m nobody! Who are you? / Emily Dickinson
• One need not be a chamber - to be haunted / Emily Dickinson
• Surgeons must be very careful / Emily Dickinson
• To fight aloud, is very brave / Emily Dickinson
• An epithalamion / John Donne
• The good- morrow / John Donne
• The elephant / Carlos Drummond de Andrade
• With no experience in such matters / Stephen Dunn
• Journey of the Magi / T. S. Eliot
• Seen through a window / David Ferry
• After apple-picking / Robert Frost
• Directive / Robert Frost
• An old man’s winter night / Robert Frost
• "Out, out -" / Robert Frost
• The oven bird / Robert Frost
• The pasture / Robert Frost
• Transcription of organ music / Allen Ginsberg
• The school children / Louise Gluck
• The holy longing / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Ode on the death of a favorite cat / Thomas Gray
• The idea of trust / Thom Gunn
• Woolworth’s / Donald Hall
• Population / Mark Halliday
• Afterwards / Thomas Hardy
• The man he killed / Thomas Hardy
• Privilege of being / Robert Hass
• The night-blooming Cereus / Robert Hayden
• From "Clearances" (3) / Seamus Heaney
• Prospects / Anthony Hecht
• The collar / George Herbert
• The envoy of Mr. Cogito / Zbigniew Herbert
• Upon Julia’s clothes / Robert Herrick
• Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins
• God’s grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins
• To seem the stranger lies my lot … / Gerard Manley Hopkins
• When I was one- and-twenty (A Shropshire Lad 13) / A. E. Housman
• The dream keeper / Langston Hughes
• Minstrel man / Langston Hughes
• Motto / Langston Hughes
• Degrees of gray in Philipsburg / Richard Hugo
• My real dwelling / Ikkyu
• The islands / Randall Jarrell
• The woman at the Washington Zoo / Randall Jarrell
• The eye / Robinson Jeffers
• The song of the banana man / Evan Jones
• Inviting a friend to supper / Ben Jonson
• Lovel’s song / Ben Jonson
• Men at forty / Donald Justice
• From Endymion / John Keats
• On a leander which Miss Reynolds, my kind friend, gave me / John Keats
• To sleep / John Keats
• Finding a long gray hair / Jane Kenyon
• The boiling water / Kenneth Koch
• Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa
• Thinking of death and dogfood / Maxine Kumin
• Hornworm : autumn lamentation / Stanley Kunitz
• The layers / Stanley Kunitz
• An Arundel tomb / Philip Larkin
• The explosion / Philip Larkin
• Caedmon / Denise Levertov
• They feed they lion / Philip Levine
• What work is / Philip Levine
• The flower-fed buffaloes / Vachel Lindsay
• Still night thoughts / Li Po
• River- snow / Liu Zongyuan
• A psalm of life / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• To Althea, from prison / Richard Lovelace
• Memories of West Street and Lepke / Robert Lowell
• The old flame / Robert Lowell
• Portrait / Antonio Machado
• Ars poetica / Archibald MacLeish
• Language lesson 1976 / Heather McHugh
• The mad scene / James Merrill
• The shore / W. S. Merwin
• On hearing a symphony of Beethoven / Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Recuerdo / Edna St. Vincent Millay
• You who wronged / Czeslaw Milosz
• When I consider how my light is spent / John Milton
• Piececitos / Gabriela Mistral
• A jellyfish / Marianne Moore
• What are years? / Marianne Moore
• The meeting of the waters / Thomas Moore
• The snow globe / Howard Nemerov
• Absence of Joaquin / Pablo Neruda
• He lived - childhood summers / Lorine Niedecker
• The day lady died / Frank O’Hara
• Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) / Frank O’Hara
• Poem (and tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock in Springfield, Massachusetts) / Frank O’Hara
• The forms of love / George Oppen
• Psalm / George Oppen
• Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred Owen
• At the new year / Kenneth Patchen
• Dawn / Octavio Paz
• Wind and water and stone / Octavio Paz
• When in the widening circle of rebirth / Fernando Pessoa
• Nick and the candlestick / Sylvia Plath
• Alone / Edgar Allan Poe
• Erat hora / Ezra Pound
• Meditatio / Ezra Pound
• The diamond cutters / Adrienne Rich
• Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev / Adrienne Rich
• Initiation / Rainer Maria Rilke
• Requiem for the death of a boy / Rainer Maria Rilke
• The sheaves / Edwin Arlington Robinson
• The unforgiven / Edwin Arlington Robinson
• I knew a woman / Theodore Roethke
• In a dark time / Theodore Roethke
• The sloth / Theodore Roethke
• Effort at speech between two people / Muriel Rukeyser
• With his venom / Sappho
• Tired and unhappy, you think of houses / Delmore Schwartz
• Helvellyn / Sir Walter Scott
• The truth the dead know / Anne Sexton
• As an unperfect actor on the stage (Sonnets 23) / William Shakespeare
• That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnets 73) / William Shakespeare
• When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (Sonnets 29) / William Shakespeare
• When forty winters shall besiege thy brow (Sonnets 2) / William Shakespeare
• Love’s philosophy / Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Stanzas written in dejection - December 1818, near Naples / Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Sweet is the rose, but grows upon a brere (Amoretti 26) / Edmund Spenser
• The gift / William Stafford
• The shirt poem / Gerald Stern
• Disillusionment of ten o’clock / Wallace Stevens
• A rabbit as king of the ghosts / Wallace Stevens
• My shadow / Robert Louis Stevenson
• Keeping things whole / Mark Strand
• The centaur / May Swenson
• Notes from a nonexistent Himalayan expedition / Wislawa Szymborska
• From Gitanjali (35, 39) / Rabindranath Tagore
• The sadness of my neighbors / James Tate
• From In memoriam A.H.H. (54) / Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Casey at the bat / Ernest Lawrence Thayer
• If I were tickled by the rub of love / Dylan Thomas
• You shall not despair / Dylan Thomas
• The evacuee / R. S. Thomas
• Bent with worry / Marina Tsvetaeva
• Like city’s rain, my heart / Paul Verlaine
• Streams / Derek Walcott
• For my people / Margaret Walker
• Lineage / Margaret Walker
• Go lovely rose! / Edmund Waller
• Tell me a story / Robert Penn Warren
• Dirge for two veterans / Walt Whitman
• The runner / Walt Whitman
• From Song of myself (50, 52) / Walt Whitman
• Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me / Walt Whitman
• Patriots’ day / Richard Wilbur
• The Harlot’s house / Oscar Wilde
• The ivy crown / William Carlos Williams
• Rain / William Carlos Williams
• We are seven / William Wordsworth
• The world is too much with us; late and soon / William Wordsworth
• After reading Tu Fu, I go outside to the Dwarf Orchard / Charles Wright
• Lying in a hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island, Minnesota / James Wright
• Whoso list to hunt / Thomas Wyatt
• A prayer for my daughter / William Butler Yeats