Readers of poetry are often told to leave poems alone - to learn them by heart or to enjoy how they sound and leave it at that. This is all very well, except for those readers who have to study poetry at school or university. Or other readers who don't yet enjoy poems because they are daunted by their seemingly impenetrable meanings or inaccessible techniques.In this annotated anthology, Robert Gullifer and Matthew Jenkinson demystify poetry while showing that there are many good reasons to pick poems apart. From Beowulf to the Iraq War, a millennium of poetry is presented to give readers a sense of how poems have evolved since we first started writing them down. Historical backgrounds, meanings, techniques and effects are explained and analysed clearly and logically to help readers understand what poets have been trying to say to us across the centuries. At the same time, major themes that have recurred in poetry are highlighted, so general readers, teachers and students can navigate the poems as they wish: by time period, by technique, or by theme.This book has been designed so it is useful to anyone interested in learning about or teaching poetry, as well as those revisiting poems and poets they may have already encountered. Those poems and poets have been carefully selected to ensure that How Poems Work: covers much of the existing poetic canon while broadening it to include diverse historically important poets who have been previously overlooked, or to include less well-known poems by already canonical poets.includes poems that are technically interesting, to allow the kind of analysis expected in classrooms and examinations. appeals to a wide audience across the English-speaking world by including British and American poems alongside those from other cultures.