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With nearly one hundred of the most popular and loved poems in the English language, this collection is one of the most comprehensive anthologies of its kind available.

Popular Poetry, Popular Verse, Volume II covers a remarkable range, from the striking vision of Blake and Shelley, the insights of Keats, to the lighter but equally memorable verse by Tennyson, Donne, and Edward Lear.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was an English poet popular in both literary and political circles. Brooke was educated at the Rugby school and went on to King's College at Cambridge University, where he socialized in intellectual crowds with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, W. B. Yeats, and the Bloomsbury writers. His later verse is considered some of the most important literary expressions of the First World War.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, is the most widely known author in all of English literature and often considered the greatest. He was an active member of a theater company for at least twenty years, during which time he wrote many great plays. Plays were not prized as literature at the time, and Shakespeare was not widely read until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a great upsurge of interest in his works began that continues today.

John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, satirist, philosopher, and chaplain who is considered a founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a group of writers characterized by their ability to coax new perspective through paradoxical images, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne's works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, and sermons. He is firmly established as one of the greatest poets in the English language, strongly influencing writers of the seventeenth century. He died in 1631 and was buried at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Tony Britton is a renowned British classical stage actor who has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. On television, he has appeared in Holby City, The Way We Live Now, and The Saint.

Jasper Britton took the lead in the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production of Richard III and has also worked for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His television appearances include The Bill and Peak Practice, and he has narrated several audiobooks.

Emma Fielding has narrated numerous audiobooks and earned two AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is an award-winning actress who has appeared in numerous television shows, films, and plays. A graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, she has worked for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has also appeared on Broadway, in Private Lives, and in the West End, in Rock 'n' Roll.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an influential English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age of English literature with the 1798 joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. He was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house, and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. By the 1860s, she lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. Her poetry reflects her loneliness, and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955.