As with novelists and short story writers, the job of poets and playwrights is to elicit emotion and generate thought. The difference is that the latter authors do so while adhering to rules different than those governing standard prose works. Where poets create rich verses loaded with subtext, playwrights rely largely on dialogue to create poignant scenes that become all the more powerful when performed onstage. This captivating collection of biographies profiles some of the greatest writers of poetry and drama, from Aeschylus to Diane Ackerman, Sophocles to David Mamet. .

Introduction; Diane Ackerman; Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Maya Angelou; Aristophanes; W.H. Auden; Samuel Beckett; William Blake; Robert Bly; Enid Blyton; Bertolt Brecht; Joseph Brodsky; Gwendolyn Brooks; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Burns; Lord Byron; Anton Chekhov; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; E.E. Cummings; Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Du Fu; T.S. Eliot; Euripides; Robert Frost; Allen Ginsberg; Lillian Hellman; Homer; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Bronson Howard; Langston Hughes; Ted Hughes; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; John Keats. . Joyce KilmerDennis Lee; Howard Lindsay And Russel Crouse; David Mamet; Christopher Marlowe; Edgar Lee Masters; Arthur Miller; John Milton; Molière; Mother Goose; Pablo Neruda; Eugene O'neill; Sylvia Plath; Ezra Pound; Adrienne Rich; Rainer Maria Rilke; Edwin Arlington Robinson; Michael Rosen; Rumi; Carl Sandburg; Frederick George Scott; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Sam Shepard; Shel Silverstein; Sophocles; Robert Louis Stevenson; Tom Stoppard; August Strindberg; Wislawa Szymborska; Dylan Thomas; Virgil; Wendy Wasserstein; Walt Whitman; Thornton Wilder.