Reproduced within this book are the essential poems of Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, John Betjeman, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and many other major poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For each, Michael Schmidt has provided an insight into their themes and the background to their work, opening for the reader a greater understanding and enjoyment of these extraordinary poems.