Introduction: The education of a poet --
"The author to her book" / Anne Bradstreet --
"To S. M. a young African painter, on seeing his works" / Phillis Wheatley --
"The Jewish cemetery at Newport" / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" / Walt Whitman --
"Shiloh" / Herman Melville --
#479 ["Because I could not stop for death"] / Emily Dickinson --
"The new colossus" / Emma Lazarus --
"Eros turannos" / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
"Madonna of the evening flowers" / Amy Lowell --
"The most of it" / Robert Frost --
"Sunday morning" / Wallace Stevens --
from Spring and All, I ["By the road to the contagious hospital"] / William Carlos Williams --
"The river-merchant's wife: a letter" / Ezra Pound --
"The steeple-jack" / Marianne Moore --
"The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" / T.S. Eliot --
"To Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane --
"Harlem" / Langston Hughes --
"Southern Road" / Sterling A. Brown --
"Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" / Theodore Roethke --
"In the waiting room" / Elizabeth Bishop --
"Cross road blues" [Take 2] / Robert Johnson --
"Middle passage" / Robert Hayden --
"St. Roach" / Muriel Rukeyser --
"Farewell in Welfare Island" / Julia de Burgos --
"A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon" / Gwendolyn Brooks --
"More light! More light!" / Anthony Hecht --
"O taste and see" / Denise Levertov --
"The day lady died" / Frank O'Hara --
"America" / Allen Ginsberg --
"Soonest mended" / John Ashbery --
"Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" / James Wright --
"To Cipriano, in the wind" / Philip Levine --
"XIII (Dedications" [from "An atlas of the difficult world"] / Adrienne Rich --
"Daddy" / Sylvia Plath --
["won't you celebrate with me"] / Lucille Clifton --
"My mother's lips" / C. K. Williams --
"Dear John, Dear Coltrane" / Michael S. Harper --
"Retreating wind" / Louise Glück --
"Ancestral graves, Kahuku" / Garrett Hongo --
"Rabbit is up to tricks" / Joy Harjo.