What is poetry? If music is sound organised in a particular way, poetry is a way of organising language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work – over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats.