The Norton Introduction to Poetry

The most wide-ranging collection of its kind, The Norton Introduction to Poetry offers a complete course in reading and writing about poetry that is designed to appeal to students of all backgrounds, abilities, and interests.

It not only sharpens students’ close-reading skills and deepens their appreciation for the emotional power of poetry, but also connects poetry to the larger world by providing a thorough introduction to poetry’s authorial, cultural, and critical contexts.

Alison Booth is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on Victorian literature and feminist theory and criticism, and her teaching at Virginia has ranged from "The Nineteenth-Century British novel" to "Utopias and Science Fiction." She is the author of Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf and editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure.

J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.

Kelly J. Mays has taught writing and literature courses for 25 years ― at Stanford University (where she earned her Ph.D.), in the Harvard Expository Writing Program, at New Mexico State University, and (since 2001) at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where she is now an Associate Professor of English.  A British literature specialist whose work has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Critical Inquiry, and other major scholarly journals, she is currently at work on a book exploring when and why nineteenth-century Britons began to label their age, their literature, and even themselves "Victorian."