America's most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis to the most famous poems of the Western tradition-and unearths some previously obscure verses worthy of a place in our canon. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia sharpens our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath, and makes a case for including in the canon works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut-and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn is a modern classic that excites even seasoned poetry lovers-and continues to create generations of new ones.

Introduction
1. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
2. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
3. William Shakespeare, The Ghost's Speech
4. John Donne, “The Flea”
5. John Donne, Holy Sonnet I
6. John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
7. George Herbert, “Church-monuments”
8. George Herbert, “The Quip”
9. George Herbert, “Love”
10. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
11. William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”
12. William Blake, “London”
13. William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us”
14. William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”
15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
17. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
18. Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
19. Emily Dickinson, “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”
20. Emily Dickinson, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
21. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
22. William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”
23. Wallace Stevens, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”
24. Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”
25. William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
26. William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”
27. Jean Toomer, “Georgia Dusk”
28. Langston Hughes, “Jazzonia”
29. Theodore Roethke, “Cuttings”
30. Theodore Roethke, “Root Cellar”
31. Theodore Roethke, “The Visitant”
32. Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife”
33. Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
34. Frank O’Hara, “A Mexican Guitar”
35. Paul Blackburn, “The Once-Over”
36. May Swenson, “At East River”
37. Gary Snyder, “Old Pond”
38. Norman H. Russell, “The Tornado”
39. Chuck Wachtel, “A Paragraph Made Up of Seven Sentences”
40. Rochelle Kraut, “My Makeup”
41. Wanda Coleman, “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead?”
42. Ralph Pomeroy, “Corner”
43. Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
Biographical Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions