‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme…’
– Shakespeare

Great poetry can indeed outlast stone and the glory of princes, and the English poetic tradition is perhaps the richest in the world. This audiobook tells the story of that tradition through its towering figures—Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson and Eliot—and through scores of other poets. Clear and accessible, blending criticism with imagination and illustrated with scores of quotations, this new history will delight all who care about the past and the future of English poetry.