One of the most powerfully moving and evocative forms of poetry, the sonnet has been popular for more than 450 years. Unlike many other poetic genres, the sonnet has never gone out of fashion and its popularity today remains unabated.
This collection contains a rich selection of over 170 English and American sonnets by more than 70 poets, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Included are great sonnets by the greatest poets. All have been carefully chosen for distinction in style or substance or both.
Included are such masterpieces of the form as: "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" by Shakespeare; "Death Be Not Proud" by Donne; "On His Blindness" by Milton; "The World Is Too Much with Us" by Wordsworth; "Ozymandias" by Shelley; "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" by Keats; "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways" by E. Browning; "Acquainted with the Night" by Frost; "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" by Millay; and poems by Spenser, Sidney, Burns, Blake, Byron, Longfellow, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, Wilde, E. A. Robinson, Dunbar, MacLeish, and many more.
In this inexpensive treasury, lovers of poetry can study and savor the ways in which a host of great poets used the versatile sonnet form to express everything from the "light conceits of love" to the most profound meditations.
Includes two selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The New Colossus" and "Ozymandias."

Treasury of over 170 English and American sonnets by more than 70 poets, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Masterpieces by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Swinburne, Yeats, Frost, Poe, many more. Includes two selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Acknowledements
THOMAS WYATT
  "The long love that in my thought doth harbor"
  "My galley charged with forgetfulness"
  "Farewell, love, and all thy laws forever"
  "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind"
"HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY"
  The Soote Season
  "Love, that doth reign and live within my thought"
GEORGE GASCOIGNE
  "You must not wonder, though you think it strange"
SIR WALTER RALEGH
  [Sir Walter Ralegh to his Son]
EDMUND SPENSER
  "Happy ye leaves! whenas those lily hands"
  "Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day"
  "One day I wrote her name upon the strand"
  "Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs"
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
  "Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show"
  "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies"
  "Come Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace"
  "Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust"
SAMUEL DANIEL
  "Fair is my Love and cruel as she 's fair"
  "Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night"
  "Let others sing of Knights and Paladines"
  "If this be love, to draw a weary breath"
MICHAEL DRAYTON
  "Dear, why should you command me to my rest"
  "Since there's no help, come le us kiss and part"
JOSHUA SYLVESTER
  "Were I as base as in the lowly plain"
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
  "When I do count the clock that tells the time"
  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
  "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"
  "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"
  "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"
  "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"
  "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame"
  "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
BARNABE BARNES
  "Ah, sweet Content, where is thy mild abode?"
JOHN DONNE
  "Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?"
  "At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow"
  "Death be not proud, though some have called thee"
  "Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you"
WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN
  "I know that all beneath the moon decays"
  "My lute, be as thou wert when thou didst grow"
GEORGE HERBERT
  Prayer
  Redemption
JOHN MILTON
  On His Being Arrived to ethe Age of Twenty-Three
  On His Blindness
  On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
  On His Deceased Wife
  "To the Lord General Cromwell, on the Proposals of Certain Ministers at the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel"
THOMAS GRAY
  On the Death of Mr. Richard West
WILLIAM BLAKE
  To the Evening Star
ROBERT BURNS
  A Sonnet upon Sonnets
WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES
  "O Time! Who know'st a lenient hand to lay"
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
  "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room"
  Scorn Not the Sonnet
  "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free"
  "Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind"
  "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
  "The world is too much with us; late and soon"
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
  Work Without Hope
  On a Discovery Made Too Late
ROBERT SOUTHEY
  Winter
CHARLES LAMB
  "A timid grace sits trembling in her eye"
JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE
  To Night
LEIGH HUNT
  The Nile
  To the Grasshopper and the Cricket
"GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON"
  Sonnet on Chillon
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
  Ozymandias
  Sonnet: England in 1819
  "Lift not the painted veil which those who live"
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
  Midsummer
  November
JOHN KEATS
  On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
  On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
  On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
  "Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell"
  When I Have Fears
  Bright Star
HARTLEY COLERIDGE
  Prayer
  "Long time a child, and still a child, when years"
THOMAS HOOD
  Silence
  Death
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
  "If thou must love me, let it be for nought"
  "Belovèd, my Belovèd, when I think"
  "If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange"
  "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
  Mezzo Cammin
  The Cross of Snow
  Milton
  The Poets
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
  Forgiveness
  Godspeed
CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER
  The Buoy-Bell
  Orion
"ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON"
  "If I were loved, as I desire to be"
  Poets and Their Bibliographies
EDGAR ALAN POE
  To Science
  Silence
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT
  My Mother
  A Garland for Advancing Years
JONES VERY
  The Columbine
  The Fair Morning
  The Clouded Morning
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
  The Street
FREDERICK GODDARD TUCKERMAN
  "An upper chamber in a darkened house"
  "Last night I dreamed we parted once again"
MATTHEW ARNOLD
  Shakespeare
  West London
GEORGE MEREDITH
  Lucifer in Starlight
  "By this he knew she wept with waking eyes"
  "In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour"
  "Thus piteously Love closed what he begat"
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
  A Sonnet
  Silent Noon
  A Superscription
  The One Hope
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
  Rest
  Youth Gone
  After Death
  Remember
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
  The Sonnet's Voice
  Coleridge
WILLIAM MORRIS
  Summer Dawn
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
  Love and Sleep
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
  The Sonnet (III)
  Lux Est Umbra Dei
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
  On Her Vanity
  As to His Choice of Her
  TO One Who Would Make a Confession
THOMAS HARDY
  Hap
  Often When Warring
MATHILDE BLIND
  The Dead
EDWARD DOWDEN
  "Leonardo's "Mona Lisa"
  Two Infinities
ROBERT BRIDGES
  "While yet we wait for spring, and from the dry"
  "In autumn moonlight, when the white air wan"
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
  God's Grandeur
  Spring
  [Carrion Comfort]
  "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief"
EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON
  What the Sonnet Is
  Sunken Gold
ALICE MEYNELL
  Renouncement
  Changeless
EMMA LAZARUS
  The New Colossus
  Echoes
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
  Silence
  Eternity
PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON
  Love's Music
  A Vain Wish
OSCAR WILDE
  Hélas
  E Tenebris
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
  Burnt Lands
  The Night Sky
WILLIAM BUTLER YEARTS
  Leda and the Swan
  Meru
ERNEST DOWSON
  To One in Bedlam
  A Last Word
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
  Reuben Bright
  How Annandale Went Out
LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS
  The Dead Poet
  To Sleep
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
  Douglass
  Slow Through the Dark
ROBERT FROST
  Once by the Pacific
  Acquainted with the Night
  The Oven Bird
  Acceptance
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
  Dreamers
RUPERT BROOKE
  The Soldier
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
  "Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave"
  "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink"
  "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"
  "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare"
ARCHIBARD MACLEISH
  The End of the World
WILFRED OWEN
  Anthem for Doomed Youth
  On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action
Alphabetical List of Titles and First Lines