A wonderful introduction to the best of english and american poetry. Louis Untermeyer's selection, enhanced with biographical commentaries, is an excellent overview of the poetry that continues to buoy my spirits. ( )

This book, along with my high school senior English teacher Philip McFarland, changed my life. Before senior year, I was contemptuous of poetry. Mr. McFarland took a few poems and went through them line by line, and I saw beauty where before I had seen only alien lines, and learned to give poems a chance. Well, you probably haven't the luck of having Mr. McFarland as a teacher, but you might be able to get hold of a copy of this book.

The book is approachable for the non-poetry-lover because it has short accounts of the lives of the poets. The poems are inserted into the middle of the accounts, with comments making the poems more accessible. The poets are in chronological order, which, combined with biographical accounts, gives the book a feeling of being an easy history of poetry rather than a book of poems.

The poems are well chosen; years after high school, I read Futility by Wilfred Owen elsewhere, loved it, and was amazed to discover that it had been sitting in the Concise Treasury all along.