- Teachers' note
- Introduction: "Poetry Emotion" / by Anna Quindlen
- Contributors (in alphabetical order) and their selections: Jane Alexander, "In Black Earth, Wisconsin" / by Andrea Musher
- Brooke Astor, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" / by William Wordsworth
- Ken Auletta, "Ode to the west wind" / by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Harolyn M. Blackwell, "To be somebody" / by Langston Hughes
- Martin Charnin, "Laughing down lonely canyons" / by James Cavernaugh
- Mario Cuomo, "Outwitted" / by Edwin Markham
- David Dinkins, "Stars" / by Langston Hughes
- E.L. Doctorow, "A blessing" / by James Wright
- Geraldine Ferraro, "If" / by Rudyard Kipling
- Allen Ginsberg, "Ode to the west wind" / by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Rudolph Giuliani, "If I can stop one heart from breaking" / by Emily Dickinson
- Richard F. Grein, excerpt from "Four quartets" / by T.S. Eliot
- David Halberstam, excerpt from "The passing of Arthur" / by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" / by Robert Frost
- Sheldon Harnick, "When I heard the learn'd astronomer" / by Walt Whitman
- Bill Irwin, "The yachts" / by William Carlos Williams
- Peter Jennings, "Man with wooden leg escapes prison" / by James Tate
- Edward I. Koch, "Annabel Lee" / by Edgar Allen Poe
- Kenneth Koch, "The dawn of me" / by Jeff Morley
- Jill Krementz, "The low road" / by Marge Piercy
- Angela Lansbury, "Cuttin' rushes" / by Moira O'Neill
- Yo-yo E. Ma, "Ode on a Grecian urn" / by John Keats
- David Mamet, "The dog" / by David Mamet
- Jason McManus, "I never saw a Moor" / by Emily Dickinson
- Joan S. McMenamin, "Life is mostly" / by A. L. Gordon, and "He that loveth" / by Thomas à Kempis
- Ved Mehta, "Dover Beach" / by Matthew Arnold
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- Ismail Merchant, "Song" / by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
- Ruth W. Messinger, "The gift outright" / by Robert Frost
- Susan Minot, "When I have fears that I may cease to be" / by John Keats
- Joyce Carol Oates, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" / by Emily Dickinson
- Ron Padgett, "A step away from them" / by Frank O'Hara
- Harold Prince, "Credo" / by Thomas Wolfe
- Anna Quindlen, "He wishes for the cloths of heaven" / by W. B. Yeats
- David Read, "Holy Sonnet XIV" ("Batter my heart, three-personed God") / by John Donne
- Richard W. Riley, "Duty was joy" / by Rabindranath Tagore
- Isabella Rossellini, "Get yourself drunk" / by Charles Baudelaire
- Gene Saks, "Does it matter?" / by Siegfried Sassoon
- Diane Sawyer, "If" / by Rudyard Kipling
- Whitney North Seymour Jr., excerpt from "Inscription for the entrance to a wood" / by William Cullen Bryant
- Ally Sheedy, "On stripping bark from myself" / by Alice Walker
- Beverly Sills, "It is not the critic who counts" / by Theodore Roosevelt
- Margaret Chase Smith, "My creed" / by Margaret Chase Smith
- Ronald B. Sobel, "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" / by Robert Frost
- Stephen Sondheim, "Come to the edge" / by Christopher Logue
- Liv Ullmann, "Meditation #17" ("No man is an island") / by John Donne
- Kurt Vonnegut, "The angel that presided o'er my birth" / by William Blake
- Wendy Wasserstein, excerpt from "The rime of the ancient mariner" / by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Paul Watkins, "Clouds" / by Rupert Brooke
- Elie Wiesel, "From tomorrow on, I shall be sad" / by Motele
- Elizabeth Winthrop, "Wild geese" / by Mary Oliver
- Tom Wolfe, excerpt from "I've been to a marvelous party" / by Noel Coward
- Grade V students.
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