In this book John Hollander offers a buoyant guided tour of American light verse-a tradition he pursues from Ambrose Bierce's sardonic The devil's dictionary quatrains to the latter-day comic inventions of Edward Gorey, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill. Along the way, American wits gathers a rich harvest of couplets, clerihews, epigrams, parodies, burlesques, and other forms of fractured verse. The varied and often surprising list of contributors includes...

In this new selection, master literary craftsman John Updike provides a long-overdue reassessment of Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has become one of the defining figures of the postwar period.

Selected poems by Kenneth Fearing.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80) published her first book--the powerfully experimental Theory of flight--at age twenty-two, and went on to an adventurous and prolific career as poet, translator, and political activist. Her expansive energies sought a poetry in which politics, geography, sexuality, mythology, and autobiography could find fused and fluid expression. From her early, cinematic "Poem out of childhood" through excerpts from her long wartime "Letter...

The classic volume by the distinguished modern poet and winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize that represents her technical mastery, her compassionate and illuminating response to a world that is both special and universal, and her warm humanity. ""If you wanted a poem," wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, "you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side...

John Hollander presents a fresh selection of Emma Lazarus's powerful verse, including the iconic poem that welcomes visitors to the Statue of Liberty, "The New Colossus."

From Books Cover: From first to last, poetry was part of Edith Wharton's writing life. While rarely (after early youth) her primary focus, it always served her as a medium for recording the most vivid impressions and emotions, an intimate journal of longings and regrets. "Poetry was important to Wharton," writes editor Louis Auchincloss, "because it enabled her to express the deeply emotional side of her nature that she kept under such tight control,...

"With an ear tuned to the most delicate musical effects, an eye for exact and heterogeneous details, and a mind bent on experiment, Louis Zukofsky was preeminent among the radical Objectivist poets of the 1930s. This is the first collection to draw on the full range of Zukofsky's poetry--containing short lyrics, versions of Catullus, and generous selections from "A", his 24-part "poem of a life"--And provides a superb introduction to a modern master...