The best poems of the English language : from Chaucer through Frost / selected and with commentary by Harold Bloom.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Art of reading poetry -- Geoffrey Chaucer -- William Dunbar -- Petrarchan poetry -- Sir Thomas Wyatt -- Sir Philip Sidney -- Edmund Spenser -- Sir Walter Ralegh -- Chidiock Tichborne -- Robert Southwell -- Christopher Marlowe -- Michael Drayton -- William Shakespeare -- Thomas Nashe -- Thomas Campion -- John Donne -- Ben Jonson -- Tom O'Bedlam -- John Cleveland -- James Shirley -- Robert Herrick -- Thomas Carew -- Richard Lovelace -- Sir John Suckling -- Edmund Waller -- Andrew Marvell -- George Herbert -- Richard Crashaw -- Henry Vaughan -- Thomas Traherne -- John Milton -- John Dryden -- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- Alexander Pope -- Samuel Johnson -- William Collins -- Thomas Gray -- Christopher Smart -- William Cowper -- Robert Burns -- William Blake -- William Wordsworth --Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- George Gordon, Lord Byron -- A.E. Housman -- Wilfred Owen -- Edward Thomas -- Isaac Rosenberg -- Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Stephen Crane -- Trumbull Stickney -- Robert Frost -- Wallace Stevens -- William Carlos Williams -- Ezra Pong -- Elinor Wylie -- H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) -- Robinson Jeffers -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- Christina Rossetti -- William Morris -- Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Emily Bronte -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- Edward Lear -- Lewis Carroll -- George Meredith -- Rudyard Kipling -- William Butler Yeats -- Lionel Johnson -- Ernest Dowson -- Thomas Hardy -- Robert Bridges -- D.H. Lawrence -- Julia Ward Howe -- Walt Whitman -- Herman Melville -- Emily Dickinson -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- Edward Fitzgerald -- Robert Browning -- Matthew Arnold -- Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Percy Bysshe Shelley -- John Keats -- Walter Savage Landor -- Thomas Love Peacock -- John Clare -- George Darley -- Thomas Lovell Beddoes -- William Cullen Bryant -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Edgar Allan Poe -- Jones Very -- Henry David Thoreau -- Marianne Moore -- T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot -- John Crowe Ransom -- Conrad Aiken -- Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Louise Bogan -- John Brooks Wheelwright -- Leonie Adams -- Allen Tate -- Hart Crane -- Index of poets -- Index of poem titles.

"The Best Poems of the English Language is a comprehensive anthology that offers the reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry." "The vast scope of this anthology begins with Chaucer and ends with poets whose births predate 1900. Harold Bloom has culled his selection according to his three absolute criteria: aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom." "Featured in this volume is a substantial and significant introductory essay called "The Art of Reading Poetry." This essay presents Bloom's critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves best, and conveys his passionate concern for how a poem should be interpreted and appreciated. Throughout this anthology, Bloom includes extensive introductions to each poet and to many of the individual poems. In such commentaries, Bloom guides the reader through what is most relevant for a true understanding of the more than one hundred poets selected."--BOOK JACKET.