Contains information on and examples of the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum, the sonnet, the ballad, blank verse, the heroic couplet, and the stanza, the elegy, the pastoral, the ode, and open forms, as well as a chapter on meter.

Introductory Statement -- On Becoming a Poet / Mark Strand -- Poetic Form : A Personal Encounter / Eavan Boland -- Acknowledgments -- I. Verse Forms -- The Villanelle -- Villanelle of His Lady's Treasures / Ernest Downson -- The House on the Hill / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Missing Dates / William Empson -- The Waking / Theodore Roethke -- One Art / Elizabeth Bishop -- Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night / Dylan Thomas -- The World and the Child / James Merrill -- Condemned Site / Mona Van Duyn -- By the Sound / John Hollander -- Saturday at the Border / Hayden Carruth -- Under the Hill / Daryl Hine -- Villanelle / Marilyn Hacker -- Reading Scheme / Wendy Cope -- Villanelle for the Middle of the Night / Jacqueline Osherow -- Close-Up of a Villanelle : "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop -- The Sestina -- Ye wastefull woodes, bear witness of my woe / Edmund Spenser -- from Old Arcadia / Philip Sidney -- Sestine 4 from Parthenophil and Parthenophe / Barnabe Barnes -- Sestina : Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni / Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- Sestina / Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Sestina / Edmund Gosse -- Sestina of the Tramp-Royal / Rudyard Kipling -- Sestina : Altaforte / Ezra Pound -- After the Trial / Weldon Kees -- The Book of Yolek / Anthony Hecht -- The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina / Miller Williams -- Nani / Alberto Rios -- Close-Up of a Sestina : "Sestina : Altaforte" by Ezra Pound -- The Pantoum -- In Town / Austin Dobson -- Pantoum of the Great Depression / Donald Justice -- Parents' Pantoum / Carolyn Kizer -- Pantoum / John Ashbery -- Grandmothers's Song / Nellie Wong -- The Method / J. D. McClatchy -- Close-Up of a Pantoum : "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice -- The Sonnet -- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / William Shakespeare -- Farewell to Love / Michael Drayton -- from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus / Mary Wroth -- Sonnet XXIII : Methought I saw my late espoused saint / John Milton -- Holy Sonnet : At the round earth's imagined corners / John Donne -- Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 / William Wordsworth -- Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Bright Star / John Keats -- from Monna Innominata / Christina Rossetti -- from Sonnets from the Portuguese (XLIII) / Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- Carrion Comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- From the Dark Tower / Countee Cullen -- Epic / Patrick Kavanagh -- from "Tulips and Chimneys" / E. E. Cummings -- To My Mother / George Barker -- After the Bomb Tests / Jane Cooper -- A Game of Chess / Gwen Harwood -- The Haw Lantern / Seamus Heaney -- Heat / Denis Johnson -- The Roman Baths at Nimes / Henri Cole -- Half a Double Sonnet / Mary Jo Salter -- Sonnet / Michael Palmer -- Close-Up of a Sonnet : "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay -- The Ballad -- The Cherry-tree Carol / Sir Patrick Spens -- The Wife of Usher's Well -- My Boy Willie -- The Changeling / John Greenleaf Whittier -- from The Ballad of Reading Gaol / Oscar Wilde -- Peter and John / Elinor Wylie -- Bagpipe Music / Louis MacNeice -- Death in Leamington / John Betjeman -- The Tale of Custard the Dragon / Ogden Nash -- We Real Cool / Gwendolyn Brooks -- Riverbank Blues / Sterling A. Brown -- Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen / W. S. Merwin -- Close-Up of a Ballad : "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks -- Blank Verse -- from his translation of The Aeneid / Henry Howard -- from Tamburlaine the Great / Christopher Marlowe -- from Julius Caesar / William Shakespeare -- from Paradise Lost / John Milton -- from Beachy Head / Charlotte Smith -- from The Prelude / William Wordsworth -- Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- Rain / Edward Thomas -- Directive / Robert Frost -- Lying / Richard Wilbur -- Stanzas in Bloomsbury / Richard Howard -- Close-Up of Blank Verse : "Directive" by Robert Frost -- The Heroic Couplet -- from The Description of Cooke-ham / Aemilia Lanyer -- The Author to Her Book / Anne Bradstreet -- A Letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685 / Anne Finch -- from Absalom and Achitophel / John Dryden -- from The Vanity of Human Wishes / Samuel Johnson -- To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works / Phillis Wheatley -- from The Deserted Village / Oliver Goldsmith -- from An Essay on Criticism / Alexander Pope -- My Last Duchess / Robert Browning -- Strange Meeting / Wilfred Owen -- The J Car / Thom Gunn -- Close-Up of the Heroic Couplet : "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning -- The Stanza -- from Troilus and Criseyde / Geoffrey Chaucer -- from The Faerie Queene / Edmund Spenser -- They Flee from Me / Thomas Wyatt -- Easter Wings / George Herbert -- The Tyger / William Blake -- So We'll Go No More A-Roving / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- I died for Beauty - but was scarce / Emily Dickinson -- The Convergence of the Twain / Thomas Hardy -- The Song of the Mad Prince / Walter de la Mare -- A Quoi Bon Dire / Charlotte Mew -- Song of the Son / Jean Toomer -- The Tropics in New York / Claude McKay -- Night Song at Amalfi / Sara Teasdale -- Not Waving but Drowning / Stevie Smith -- On Teaching the Young / Yvor Winters -- Those Winter Sundays / Robert Hayden -- Yes / Muriel Rukeyser -- Warming Her Pearls / Carol Ann Duffy -- Epith / Carol Muske -- Close-Up of a Stanza : "I died for Beauty - but was scarce" by Emily Dickinson -- II. Meter -- III. Shaping Forms -- The Elegy -- Lament for the Makaris / William Dunbar -- If Ever Hapless Woman Had a Cause / Mary Sidney Herbert -- On My First Son / Ben Jonson -- Epitaph. On her Son H.P. at St. Syth's Church where her body also lies Interred / Katherine Philips -- Lycidas / John Milton -- Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666. Copied out of a Loose Paper / Anne Bradstreet -- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard / Thomas Gray -- R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida / Emily Bronte -- O Captain! My Captain! / Walt Whitman -- Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold -- To His Love / Ivor Gurney -- Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter / John Crowe Ransom -- Tears in Sleep / Louise Bogan -- In Memory of W. B. Yeats / W. H. Auden -- from The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket / Robert Lowell -- Dream Song / John Berryman -- To the Dead / Frank Bidart -- In Memoriam Paul Celan / Edward Hirsch -- The Legend / Garrett Hongo -- The Elegy for New York / Douglas Carse -- Tiara / Mark Doty -- Supernatural Love / Gjertrud Schnackenberg -- Mirror in February / Thomas Kinsella -- Iris / David St. John -- Child Burial / Paula Meehan -- Song / Rosanna Warren -- The Pastoral -- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love / Christopher Marlowe -- from Love's Labor's Lost / William Shakespeare -- The Garden / Andrew Marvell -- To My Sister / William Wordsworth -- Ode on a Grecian Urn / John Keats -- Loveliest of Trees / A. E. Housman -- The Wife of Llew / Francis Ledwidge -- Urban Pastoral / Babette Deutsch -- Remembered Morning / Janet Lewis -- The Thought-Fox / Ted Hughes -- The Explosion / Philip Larkin -- Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota / James Wright -- Midsummer, Tobago / Derek Walcott -- The Bear / Galway Kinnell -- Fog / Amy Clampitt -- Let Evening Come / Jane Kenyon -- Smoke / Philip Levine -- Meditation at Lagunitas / Robert Hass -- From the Porch / John Koethe -- A Walrus Tusk from Alaska / Alfred Corn -- Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night / Charles Wright -- The Broad Bean Sermon / Les Murray -- Of the Finished World / Lucie Brock-Broido -- Tornados / Thylias Moss -- Loss / C. K. Williams -- Waiting for the Storm / Timothy Steele -- An Engraving of Blake / Mary Kinzie -- Pygmalion's Image / Eilean Ni Chuilleanain -- Mock Orange / Louise Gluck -- The Black Walnut Tree / Mary Oliver -- Gateposts / Medbh McGuckian -- Heart of the Matter / Susan Prospere -- Shoeing the Currach / Mary O'Malley -- The Ode -- Ode to the West Wind / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- To Autumn / John Keats -- Ode / Henry Timrod -- The Fire of Driftwood / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- from The Bridge / Hart Crane -- The Paper Nautilus / Marianne Moore -- Australia 1970 / Judith Wright -- Miracle Glass Co. / Charles Simic -- The Blue Swallows / Howard Nemerov -- America / Robert Creeley -- Ode to Meaning / Robert Pinsky -- Perhaps the World Ends Here / Joy Harjo -- IV. Open Forms -- The Circus Animals' Desertion / W. B. Yeats -- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T. S. Eliot -- I, Too / Langston Hughes -- The Idea of Order at Key West / Wallace Stevens -- Spring and All / William Carlos Williams -- America / Allen Ginsberg -- Ave Maria / Frank O'Hara -- Uncertain Oneiromancy / Denise Levertov -- Daddy / Sylvia Plath -- Diving into the Wreck / Adrienne Rich -- move / Lucille Clifton -- The Language of the Brag / Sharon Olds -- The Colonel / Carolyn Forche -- The German Army, Russia, 1943 / Ai -- Starlight Scope Myopia / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Reading Plato / Jorie Graham -- Close-Up of Open Forms : "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich.