Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson and Thoreau; from Keats, Blake and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost’s tribute to the evanescence of spring in Nothing Gold Can Stay to Langston Hughes’ moody Summer Night in Harlem; from the stopped woods in Marie Ponsot’s End of October to the chilling mind of winter in Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man , the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage with the world outside ourselves.