Tales include The Doll, Running Wolf, The Little Beggar, The Occupant of the Room, The Man Whom the Trees Loved, The Valley of the Beasts, The South Wind, The Man Who Was Milligan, The Trod, The Terror of the Twins, The Deferred Appointment, Accessory Before the Fact, The Glamour of the Snow, The House of the Past, The Decoy, The Tradition, The Touch of Pan, Entrance and Exit, The Pikestaffe Case, The Empty Sleeve, Violence, and The Lost Valley.

    Fifty-one poets represented--deliberately fewer than inmost anthologies, so that sufficient space can be devoted to each poet to afford a real understanding of his or her work. More recent and less well-known poets are represented wherever possible by works of some length rather than by a scattering of short poems. Brief biographical notes at the endenable the reader to know in what volume of the poet's work each poem originally appeared.

    Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image—and miraculously succeeding.

    Lawrence -- Haircut / Ring Lardner -- Guests of the Nation / Frank O'Connor -- Old Mortality / Katherine Anne Porter -- Spotted Horses / William Faulkner -- Lions, Harts, Leaping Does / J.F. Powers -- The Headless Hawk / Truman Capote -- A Good Man Is Hard to Find / Flannery O'Connor -- Tabusse and His Dogs / André Chamson -- The Killers / Ernest Hemingway -- Where a Man Dwells / Herbert Gold -- The Proud Suitor / James Buechler

    Contains stories by Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Murray Leinster, Lester del Rey, Frederic Brown, Fletcher Pratt, Ray Bradbury, John D. MacDonald, Fritz Leiber Jr, and C. M. Kornbluth. "Desertion" by Clifford D. Simak"Mewhu's Jet" by Theodore Sturgeon"Nobody Saw the Ship" by Murray Leinster"The Wings of Night" by Lester del Rey"Arena" by Fredric Brown"The Roger Bacon Formula" by Fletcher Pratt"Forever and the Earth" by Ray Bradbury"The Miniature" by John D MacDonald"Sanity" by Fritz Leiber"The Only Thing We Learn" by C. M. Kornbluth

    1. Medieval and Renaissance poets: Langland to Spenser.--v. 2. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets: Marlowe to Marvell.--v. 3. restoration and Augustan poets: Milton to Goldsmith.--v. 4. Romantic poets: Blake to Poe.--v. 5. Victorian and Edwardian poets: Tennyson to Yeats.