Milton Meltzer, one of the most respected chroniclers of twentieth-century history, turns his attention to the most personal of genres--poetry--and selects fifty-nine poems by American writers that celebrate, assail, and define events within seven major historical periods of the United States. Old masters, such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and William Cullen Bryant and modern-day greats, such as Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as today's young poets offer their personal perspectives of events that have shaped our lives. This rich, important collection features brief notations that precede each poem, placing each work in the context of the period. Biographies of each poet illuminate each life. Here is a major poetry anthology that gives young readers "the poets' sense of the past, as well as of the life around them . . . extending and deepening the range of our own experience."