Louis Untermeyer, the American poet perhaps most familiar with the lives and works of the great writers in the English language, tells of the touching, humorous and dramatic incidents which have made up the lives and contributed to the poetic genius of each of twenty-five poets from Chaucer to Frost.

These are the unacknowledged legislators; music-makers, “movers and shakers”, poets who have influenced our ideas, affected our emotions and enriched our language. The chapters not only tell the stories of their lives but also relate their lives to their poems and reveal how and why they wrote the way they did. This work aims to show what the poets meant to the development of literature and, most of all, what they mean to us.