A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Introduction Michael O'Neill; 1. Old English poetry Bernard O'Donoghue; 2. The Gawain-poet and medieval romance Corinne Saunders; 3. Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and their legacy) Wendy Scase; 4. Langland: Piers Plowman A. V. C. Schmidt; 5. Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales Laura Varnam; 6. Late-medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas Felicity Riddy; 7. Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey Elizabeth Heale; 8. Spenser Andrew Hadfield; 9. Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric Katharine A. Craik; 10. The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare Paul Edmondson; 11. Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson Jonathan Post; 12. Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell Alison Shell; 13. Milton's shorter poems Barbara K. Lewalski; 14. Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes Barbara K. Lewalski; 15. Aphra Behn, John Dryden and their contemporaries Hester Jones; 16. Dryden: major poems Steven N. Zwicker; 17. Swift Claude Rawson; 18. Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet Claude Rawson; 19. Eighteenth-century women poets Christine Gerrard; 20. Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Goldsmith, Thomson, Young, Cowper, and others) Richard Terry; 21. Lyric poetry: 1740-90 David Fairer; 22. Romantic poetry: an overview Seamus Perry; 23. William Blake's poetry and prophecies John Beer; 24. Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads and other poems Timothy Webb; 25. Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion Alison Hickey; 26. Second-generation Romantic poetry 1 (Hunt, Byron, Moore) Jane Stabler; 27. Byron's Don Juan Bernard Beatty; 28. Second-generation Romantic poetry 2 (Shelley and Keats) Michael O'Neill; 29. Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Darley, Clare, Hemans, Landon Michael Bradshaw; 30. Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon) Heidi Thomson; 31. Victorian poetry: an overview Richard Cronin; 32. Tennyson Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; 33. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Herbert Tucker; 34. Emily Brontë, Arnold, and Clough Michael O'Neill; 35. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne David G. Riede; 36. Christina Rossetti and Hopkins Catherine Phillips; 37. Later Victorian voices 1 (James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman) Nicholas Shrimpton; 38. Later Victorian voices 2: John Davidson, Rudyard Kipling, 'Michael Field' (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper), Eugene Lee-Hamilton, May Kendall, Augusta Webster Francis O'Gorman; 39. Modernist and modern poetry: an overview Jason Harding; 40. Hardy and Mew Ralph Pite; 41. Yeats Peter Vassallo; 42. Imagism Vincent Sherry; 43. T. S. Eliot Gareth Reeves; 44. Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Edward Thomas Mark Rawlinson; 45. Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry Michael O'Neill; 46. Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s John Goodby; 47. Larkin and the Movement Stephen Regan; 48. Three twentieth-century women poets: Laura Riding, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath Alice Entwistle; 49. Hughes and Heaney Edward Larrissy; 50. Hill Andrew Michael Roberts; 51. Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets Stephen Regan; 52. Contemporary poetries in English: c.1980 to the present 1 - the radical tradition Peter Barry; 53. Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2 Jamie McKendrick; Bibliography; Index.