“What an achievement, these sixty years of poetry! In whatever terms we Americans regard the rest of our recent history, the score of things done well and done ill, this much at least we have done superlatively.”—Hayden Carruth

This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period—Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks among them—along with short biographies of each.

“Not only the best on its period, I think, but is even perhaps safe from the competition of rivals.”—Robert Lowell "Not only the best on its period, I think, but it is even perhaps safe from the competition of rivals."
--Robert Lowell

"What an achievement, these sixty years of poetry!  In whatever terms we Americans regard the rest of our recent history, the score of things done well and done ill, this much at least we have done superlatively."
--Hayden Carruth