Lives of the Poets

From Piers Plowman to the post-modernists, from fifteenth-century Scotland to the Carribean today, Michael Schmidt’s scholarship and enthusiasm bring alive the works of more than 300 poets of the last 700 years.

Traversing the landscapes of biography, form, culture and history, Schmidt explores not just the story of English poetry, but English as a language, tracing voices down the centuries and across continents.

Amusing, contentious, authoritative and accessible, Lives of the Poets is the most comprehensive one-volume history of poetry in print from one of our foremost literary biographers.