From Anne Bradstreet, who died in 1762, to Richard Wilbur, born in 1921, this anthology aims both to show what has happened in American poetry and to represent what is best in it. Minor figures, such as Freneau, Longfellow and Whittier, are seen at their best rather than their most representative historically. Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Crane and Pound, in whose longer poems much of the greatness of American poetry resides, are included by means of the best of their shorter work. The author's introduction conveys a sense of the quality of American poetry as a whole without falsifying its variety and he produces brief individual introductions to six poets - Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Pound, Stevens and Roethke - the variousness of whose work is characteristic.