This book brings together the most notable verse that has been written for children over the past five hundred years. Based on a fresh examination of the sources of children's literature, the book contains more than three hundred poems by well over a hundred named authors (a fifth of them American) arranged chronologically, from Chaucer and Lydgate to T. S. Eliot and Ogden Nash. The volume thus offers a conspectus of verse-writing for children in the English language; and the notes on the authors, at the end of the volume, which form almost a directory to those who have written the best verse for the young, deal in particular with the background to the poems given here. This book is intended for parents, lovers of poetry, children.