这本英文专著介绍、鉴赏和导读英美32位主要诗人，包括他们的生平、创作风格、主题表现、诗歌技巧和诗歌流派，试图结合专著的学术深度与文学教材的诗人覆盖面，用于高校文学专业高级本科生和研究生的英美诗歌教学。

曾虹，1997年获北京外国语大学英美文学博士，2002年获北卡罗来纳州立大学比较文学博士，在美国大学任教15年，现在是西南交通大学英美文学和比较文学教授。出版专著7部。

Preface
Part Ⅰ Introduction Elements of Poetry
Part Ⅱ English Poets
Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer: Implicit Ironist and Gullible Appreciator of All Vitality
Edmund Spenser: Theoretical Asceticism and Sensuous Garden
William Shakespeare: Tragedy, Divided Mind and Negative Capability
Metaphysical Poets and John Milton
John Donne: The Inventor of Metaphysical Conceit
Andrew Marvell: The Mower as Death and Lover
George Herbert: The Banquet of Sacred Devotion
John Milton: Satan as the Tragic Hero
Early Romantic Poets
William Blake: The Visionary Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Samuel Coleridge: Christian Redemption and Diabolical Poetics
William Wordsworth: Divinized and Fallen Nature
Later Romantic Poets
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Rhapsody of Destructive-Creative Energy and Disillusionment with Rousseaurian Nature
John Keats: Priesthood of the Mortal World
George Gordon Byron: The Ingenious Ironist and the Postmodem Text of Don Juan
Late Victorian Poets: Tennyson, Browning and Hardy
Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Melancholy of Solipsistic Artist
Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologue and Atomized Self
Thomas Hardy: The Tragedy of Will-to-Live
Early 20th Century Modernists: Yeats,
Eliot and Dylan Thomas
William Butler Yeats: From the Romantic Lyricistto the Occult Visionary
T.S. Eliot: Making Past Fragments into Modem Myth
Dylan Thomas: The Cosmic Significance of Human Anatomy
Part Ⅲ American Poets
Whitman and Dickinson
Walt Whitman: The Great Unifier and Cosmic Self
Emily Dickinson: Anxiety, Nothingness and Being
Early 20th Century Modernists
Ezra Pound: Translator as Inventor of Modem Poetics
William Carlos Williams: From European Modernist Art to a New American Poetics
Marianna Moore: "Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads"
Elizabeth Bishop: The Juxtaposition of the Quotidian and the Catastrophic, the Precise and the Fantastic
Stevens, Robert Frost and Robert Bly
Wallace Stevens: The Necessary Angel of Imagination vs Zen Poetics
Robert Frost: Traditional Folklore and Hidden Vision of Darkness
Robert Bly: The Underground Imagery and Taoist Poetics
The Beat Generation, Confessional Poets and Merwin
Allen Ginsberg: Manifesto of the Beat Generation
Robert Lowell: Confessional Life study and Calvinist Outlook
Sylvia Plath: Affinity with Edward Munch's Symbolist Painting
W.S. Merwin: Taoist and Zen Buddhist Influence and "The Third Body" Sensibility