Featuring some of the most essential poems ever written, 30 Poems to Memorize (Before It’s Too Late) is a book for people who believe that the mind is worth filling with beautiful things. Each poem, which has been carefully selected by a panel of poets, educators, and scholars has been chosen for its memorizable-ness, for the properties within the poem that make it worth learning by heart–and keeping there. And alongside each poem is a brief but thoughtful essay that explores the poem, identifying questions to ask, images to contemplate, and forms to revel in. Here you will find sonnets by Shakespeare, Donne, and Keats; legendary verse from Hopkins, Dickinson, and Wordsworth; classics from Frost, Eliot, and Auden; and memorable stanzas from modern masters like Wilbur, Kenyon, and Espaillat–and many others. In short, the poems in this anthology are worth spending time with. They are the kind of poems you will go back to, the kind that become a part of how you see and experience the world. We each have a limited amount of time to fill our minds–and our souls–with good things. Here’s one tool to help.

Including poems by Homer, Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, William Wordsworth, Wendell Berry, Jane Kenyon, Langston Hughes, Dana Gioia, Elizabeth Jennings, Rhina Espaillat, W.B. Yeats, John Keats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, A.E. Stallings, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Percy Shelley, Richard Hayden, Richard Wilbur,

With essays by Anthony Esolen, Maurice Manning, James Matthew Wilson, Sally Thomas, Jessica Hooten Wilson, A.M. Juster, Christine Perrin, Jeffrey Bilbro, Heidi White, Ian Andrews, Emily Andrews, Brian Phillips, Matthew Bianco, and David Kern.

Featuring an introductory essay on how to read a poem by Sally Thomas.

Featuring linocut images of every poet by Kirstie Ruffatto.