This book asks if poetry–or a cultural practice we now call poetry–was continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616. It investigates how the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms played a part in the lives of hearers and readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, Europe during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and Britain during the Renaissance. In tracking both continuity and change across these many centuries, the book throws fresh light on the role and importance of poetry in western culture.