[v. 1] From the 1890's to the high modernist mode. Part 1: Poetry around the turn of the century. British poetry in the 1890s : introduction ; The Victorian tradition and the Celtic twilight ; Ars Victrix : the London avant-garde ; The narrative protest ; The American milieu, 1890-1912 ; The beginning of the modern movement in America

Part 2: Poetry in rapport with a public. Transitions and premises ; Thomas Hardy ; Craftsmen of the beautiful and the agreeable ; The Georgian poets ; Robert Frost ; The Irish scene ; Poetry of World War I

Part 3: Popular modernism. The new poetry of America ; Imagism ; Poetry for a democracy ; Conservative and regional poets of America ; Black poets of America : the first phase ; British poetry after the war, 1918-1928

Part 4: The beginnings of the high modernist mode. Ezra Pound : the early career ; T.S. Eliot : the early career ; The New York avant-garde : Stevens and Williams to the early 1920s and Marianne Moore ; William Butler Yeats.

[v. 2] Modernism and after. Part 1: The age of modern modernism. The ascendancy of T.S. Eliot, 1925-1950 ; Eliot's later career ; Modes of modern style in the United States ; Hart Crane ; The poetry of critical intelligence ; The period style of the 1930s in England ; W.H. Auden ; The English romantic revival, 1934-1943

Part 2: The resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens. Reappraising the modernists ; Ezra Pound : The cantos ; The impact of William Carlos Williams ; The later poetry of Wallace Stevens ; Other modernist poets

Part 3: Postmodernism. The postwar period : introduction ; Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop ; Breaking through the new criticism ; Robert Lowell ; In and out of the movement : the generation of the 1950s in England ; English poetry in the 1960s and 1970s ; The poetry of Ireland ; Open form ; Poetry in New York and San Francisco ; Against "civilization" ; Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich ; Black poets of America ; Meditations of the solitary mind : John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons ; The achievement of James Merrill.