To mark National Poetry Day 1997, Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices. The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise.

Providing more than 450 pages of poetry and commentary in a handsome large two-column format, Poets on Poets celebrates vital continuities: the range of poets making selections and the range of poetry selected is without precedent in an English-language poetry anthology. Its aim is to encourage a wider readership of classic English poetry and to signal the generative connection between new poetry and the best of the past.



Among the more than eighty pairings are:

SIR THOMAS WYATT Elaine Feinstein
EDMUND SPENSER John Heath-Stubbs
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Les Murray
BEN JONSON Thom Gunn
JOHN DONNE C.H.Sisson
JOHN MILTON Peter Levi
JOHN DRYDEN Christopher Logue
EARL OF ROCHESTER Maureen Duffy
THE ENGLISH HYMN WRITERS Anne Ridler
WILLIAM BLAKE Kathleen Raine
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE D.J.Enright
THE BRONTE SISTERS Gillian Clarke
EDWARD LEAR Sophie Hannah
JOHN KEATS Andrew Motion
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Eavan Boland
ROBERT BROWNING Mark Doty
THOMAS HARDY Patricia Beer
A. E. HOUSMAN Wendy Cope
W. B. YEATS Thomas Kinsella
EDGAR ALLAN POE Richard Wilbur