A vital, exciting, and highly enjoyable guide to poetry, from antiquity to the present, by one of the greatest supporters of literature.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a specific way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language that becomes special to be remembered and appreciated. It does not always function – throughout the centuries countless poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not been forgotten.

John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one, written nearly four thousand years ago, to those being written today. Carey examines poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also analyzes more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who are beginning to challenge what makes a poem "great" in the first place.

For readers of all ages, this little history sheds light on the wealth of the world's poems – and the elixir quality that makes them even more appealing.

Pages: 320, Year of Publication: 0209, Dimensions: 14x14cm