"Wadsworth" is the publisher and it put its name on this "Handbook" of poetics.
The Preface is addressed to Students: ..."Furthermore, in addition to increasing one's general competence in language, poems provide a kind of knowledge unobtainable elsewhere, in college or out. This kind of knowledge is best described as 'experiential', because it is not so much contained in a poem as in a reader's experience of a poem. The aim of the book, then, is to show you how a poem imparts an experience."

The author take up the elements of poetry--words, images, figures, symbols, rhythms, sounds, and tone--in separate chapters. The penultimate chapter takes up the whole, and the final chapter considers what makes a poem "good or bad".

The authors presuppose the student to have a Dictionary and a "translation of the Bible" at hand. [viii]

A 2d Section contains a selected Anthology of over 300 canonical poems grouped by theme, subject or device. And some "fresher" proposed "pre-canonical" works. These are grouped for ease of comparison.