Lowell begins this volume of essays with a charming "Apology for a Preface." The bulk of the book discusses English poets: Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. The author then turns his eye to the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as well as French-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was the master impresario of English Romanticism, an enormously erudite and tireless critic, lecturer, and polemicist who almost single-handedly created the intellectual climate in which the Romantic movement was received and understood. He was also, in poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, the most uncanny, surreal, and startling of the great English poets.

Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns on the Bankside to the pulpit of St. Paul's, John Stubbs's biography is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering...

"This is a collection of free translations from the ancient Greek poet Callimachus, whose surviving work includes the Aitia, a narrative elegy; the Iambi, short poems on occasional themes; and the Hecale, a small-scale epic. The poet and critic Stephanie Burt has written contemporary adaptations of what she calls "Callimachus's lyric, epigrammatic, and narrative genius for our times." These are not literal translations for students of Greek, but instead...