Compact anthology features many of the best works by 59 poets writing in English, among them Edmund Spenser, Christina Rossetti, John Milton, Robert Burns, and William Blake.

The works of three seventeenth century poets, Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and John Edmund, brought together in one volume.

In 1660, Edmund Waller was an eminent poet whose claims to fame rivaled those of even his most illustrious predecessors, while Andrew Marvell had scarcely any reputation at all. Today, however, that situation is completely reversed. A. B. Chambers's study shows that Waller has been unjustly neglected in recent times and that, together, some of the work of Waller and Marvell bridged the gap between the work of the early seventeenth century and the Restoration. Chambers suggests that Waller and Marvell are mutually illuminating, that their poems have substantial intrinsic interest, and that they opened the door through which Dryden made his entrance to become the dominant literary figure of the Restoration. Chambers situates important poems by both authors within historical and literary contexts as an aid to elucidating both meaning and poetic achievement, but he also pays close historical attention to details of language, syntax, and metrics that supply meaning. He provides a significant new reading of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," while also situating the poem within Marvell's poetic and political careers. He also presents a fuller, more accurate picture of the period by taking into account the conceptual and poetic problems that both authors necessarily confronted and by examining the curiously inverted parallelism of the strategies that they employed in addressing those problems.

Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.