William Blake 1757-1827 "It could be argued that he dared... to be the first modern poet... Human liberty and imagination have never been better served." — Stanley Kunitz 
Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 "....he is one of the very few poets who, under minimal scrutiny, escape the past... the content of his poems... is often pleasure-resistant. That was his whole gamble, and he won." — Joseph Brodsky 
C. P. Cavafy 1863-1933 "[His] commitment to hedonism, to political scepticism, and to honest self-awareness... anticipates the prevailing aura of our time." — Edmund Keeley 
William Wordsworth 1770-1850 "...emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness" — Seamus Heaney 
Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 "....she is the great poet of inwardness, of that indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all one." — Joyce Carol Oates 
George Herbert 1593-1633 "....not only matchless serenity, joy, or gratitude, but in equal measure frustration, anger, insubordination and grief. The religious life is by no means easier than the secular life...." — Anthony Hecht |
The Ecco Press: The Essential Poets Series Sample poems from the series:
The Essential Poets series is a pocket-sized (4 5/8" x 6 1/2"), affordable line offering brief studies of those writers who have most powerfully shaped the poetic tradition in American letters. Selected and introduced by important contemporary authors, each volume represents an informal seminar and introduction to the seminal works of major poets of the past and shed light on the ways in which their work has informed and influenced the voice of contemporary poetry. The Essential Blake Selected by Stanley Kunitz The Essential Hardy Selected by Joseph Brodsky The Essential Cavafy Selected by Edmund Keeley The Essential Wordsworth Selected by Seamus Heaney The Essential Dickinson Selected by Joyce Carol Oates The Essential Herbert Selected by Anthony Hecht The Essential Whitman Selected by Galway Kinnell The Essential Haiku Selected by Robert Hass The Essential Campion Selected by Charles Simic The Essential Donne Selected by Amy Clampitt The Essential Byron Selected by Paul Muldoon The Essential Wyatt Selected by W. S. Merwin The Essential Browning Selected by Douglas Dunn The Essential Poe Selected by Dave Smith The Essential Marvell Selected by Donald Hall The Essential Clare Selected by Carolyn Kizer The Essential Shakespeare Selected by Ted Hughes The Essential Robinson Selected by Donald Hall The Essential Keats Selected by Philip Levine The Essential Hopkins Selected by C. K. Williams The Essential Burns Selected by Robert Creeley The Essential Rossetti Selected by John Hollander The Essential Melville Selected by Robert Penn Warren The Ecco Press 100 West Broad Street Hopewell, NJ 08525 
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