Introduction / by Caroline Kennedy
First poem. The first book / Rita Dove


Here I am, and other poems about the self. from The world is round / Gertrude Stein ; I am cherry alive / Delmore Schwartz ; My shadow / Robert Louis Stevenson ; Crying / Galway Kinnell ; O dear! How disgusting is life! / Edward Lear ; Bad morning / Langston Hughes ; Ode to Pablo's tennis shoes / Gary Soto ; Don't worry if your job is small / anonymous ; It couldn't be done / Edgar Albert Guest ; Personal / Langston Hughes ; A man said / Stephen Crane ; Sonnet 94 / William Shakespeare ; Dust of snow / Robert Frost ; If
/ Rudyard Kipling ; from A drama of exile / Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; Between what I see and what I say
/ Octavio Paz ; Micah 6:8


I dreamed I had to pick a mother out, and other poems about family. Disobedience / A.A. Milne ; Brother / Mary Ann Hoberman ; Brother and sister / Lewis Carroll ; If Little Red Riding Hood
/ Jeff Moss ; Andre / Gwendolyn Brooks ; The parent / Ogden Nash ; Bilingual/bilingüe / Rhina P. Espaillat ; Ballad of Birmingham / Dudley Randall ; Manners / Elizabeth Bishop


I'm expecting you! and other poems about friendship and love. Bee! I'm expecting you! / Emily Dickinson ; Vade mecum / Billy Collins ; Evil / Langston Hughes ; A poison tree / William Blake ; Tableau / Countee Cullen ; Voices rising / DreamYard Prep Slam Team ; He wishes for the cloths of heaven / William Butler Yeats ; The dream keeper / Langston Hughes ; A blessing / James Wright ; Invitation to love / Paul Laurence Dunbar ; 1 Corinthians 13:1-8 / Saint Paul ; For Katrina's sun-dial / Henry van Dyke ; Liberty / Janet S. Wong


I met a little elf-man, once, and other poems about fairies, ogres, and witches. The little elf / John Kendrick Bangs ; The fairies / Rose Fyleman ; I'd love to be a fairy's child / Robert Graves ; Some one / Walter de la Mare ; Under the bed / Penny Trzynka ; What's that? / Florence Parry Heide ; from The masque of queens / Ben Jonson ; Song of the ogres / W.H. Auden ; The splendour falls on castle walls / Alfred, Lord Tennyson


Where can a man buy a cap for his knee? and other nonsensical poems. Foolish questions / American folk rhyme ; Way down South / anonymous ; There was an old man in a garden / Edward Lear ; There was an old person whose habits / Edward Lear ; Baby ate a microchip / Neal Levin ; from Through the looking-glass / Lewis Carroll ; Herbert Glerbett / Jack Prelutsky ; The toys talk of the world / Katharine Pyle ; All about boys and girls / John Ciardi ; Some worlds inside of words / Richard Wilbur ; The tale of custard the dragon / Ogden Nash


It is the duty of the student, and other poems about school. Duty of the student / Edward Anthony ; Gnome / Samuel Beckett ; Sick / Shel Silverstein ; Homework / Jane Yolen ; Lucky trade / Matthew M. Fredericks ; Bubble troubles / Janet S. Wong ; How to paint a donkey / Naomi Shihab Nye ; The lesson / Billy Collins ; Theme for English B / Langston Hughes ; if everything happens that can't be done / E.E. Cummings


We dance round in a ring and suppose, and other poems about sports and games. The secret sits / Robert Frost ; Hide-and-seek, 1933 / Galway Kinnell ; Block city / Robert Louis Stevenson ; The girls in the circle / Nikki Giovanni ; We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks ; Slam, dunk, & hook / Yusef Komunyakaa ; Defender / Linda Sue Park ; Zuri at bat / Nikki Grimes ; Casey at the bat / Ernest Lawrence Thayer ; Casey's revenge / Grantland Rice ; May / John Updike


Four score and seven years ago, and other poems about war. Will, lost in a sea of trouble / Archilochos ; The destruction of Sennacherib / George Gordon, Lord Byron ; Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley ; from Henry V, IV, iii, 56-67 / William Shakespeare ; Shiloh / Herman Melville ; Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln ; Charge of the light brigade / Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Ukase / Pfc. C.G. Tiggas ; When he was small, when he would fall / Vladimir Nabokov ; The unknown soldier / Billy Rose ; First they came for the Jews / Martin Niemöller ; from "Voice from Lemnos" / Seamus Heaney ; Peace / Gerard Manley Hopkins


The world is so full of a number of things, and other poems about nature. from "Auguries of innocence" / William Blake ; Happy thought / Robert Louis Stevenson ; What are heavy? / Christina Rossetti ; Devotion / Robert Frost ; Will there really be a "morning"? / Emily Dickinson ; Ballad of the morning streets / Amiri Baraka ; who are you, little i / E.E. Cummings ; In beauty may I walk / from the Navajo ; Tommy / Gwendolyn Brooks ; from As You Like It, II, v, 5-12: 18-25 / William Shakespeare ; Anecdote of the jar / Wallace Stevens ; The snow man / Wallace Stevens ; Winter trees / William Carlos Williams ; from The metamorphoses, Book I / Ovid ; The world / William Brighty Rands


Extra credit. from The Canterbury tales, general prologue / Geoffrey Chaucer ; Young Lochinvar / Sir Walter Scott ; The cremation of Sam McGee / Robert Service ; Paul Revere's ride / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Kubla Khan / Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Last poem. Catch a little rhyme / Eve Merriam.