Uniting the works of 30 poets, the author of the bestselling Poet's Choice and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry traces the image of the nightingale through two-and-a-half millennia of literature, in which the songbird has been used to signify love, joy, and sorrow. Here of course is John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," along with Christina Rossetti's "Twilight Calm," Hafiz's "Here Will I Take My Rest," and a selection from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Other authors represented include Sophocles, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Heinrich Heine, Marie de France, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.