The Poets Laureate Anthology

The first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.

This is a groundbreaking record of poetry, charting the course of American verse over the last seventy-five years. For the first time, work from each of the forty-three poets laureate is gathered in a single volume, one that is a pleasure to read, full of some of the world’s best-known poems and many new surprises. From Robert Frost’s iconic “The Road Not Taken” to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” from the elegiac Stanley Kunitz to the humor of Billy Collins, the wide-ranging selections in this book celebrate the monuments of American poetry.

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt has gathered and introduced poems by each of the forty-three poets who have been named this country’s poet laureate since the post, originally called the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, was established in 1937. Spirited introductions place the poets and their poems in historical and literary context and shine light on the interesting and often uneasy relationship between politics and art. The Poets Laureate Anthology was developed in association with the Library of Congress, the home of the U.S. poet laureate. It is an inviting, monumental collection for everyone’s library, with much of the best poetry written in America over the last century.

43 black-and-white photographs

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, a former poetry editor at the New York Times Book Review, is the editor of the acclaimed anthology Poems of New York and The Poets Laureate Anthology. She lives in New York City and currently teaches American literature at Sarah Lawrence College.

Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the United States and the State of New York. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College and a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute. A Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and author of many collections of poetry, including Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds and Horoscopes for the Dead, he lives in Westchester, New York.