In times past, Americans with a love of poetry routinely learned by heart dozens of poems - Shakespeare's sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the wit of Dorothy Parker and the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new, one for each day of the year, worth learning by heart. All share two things in common - they are short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand with the great poetry of the language, from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath. On most pages readers will also find brief, often amusing, always interesting trivia about the poets and their poems.