Discusses poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, Thoreau, Jones Very, Poe, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, J.G. Holland, Herman Melville, Sidney Lanier, Stephen Crane, William Vaughn Moody, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Trumbull Stickney, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Frost, Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robinson Jeffers, Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, James Dickey, Howard Nemerov, Robert Kelly, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley.