A representative anthology of five centuries of poetry, which includes the greatest poets of the Old and New Worlds (John Donne, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, William Yeats, Emily Dickinson and others), summarizes half a century of work by the famous translator Grigory Mikhailovich Kruzhkov.English , American, French and Spanish poems are presented in chronological order, revealing the general trends of European poetry. The book begins with a kind of prologue: ancient Irish poems of the early Middle Ages - it was here that rhymed poetry first appeared, which soon spread throughout the continent. Grigory Kruzhkov is a laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, the “Master” Award of the Guild of Translators, the Big Bunin and Voloshin Prizes, etc.; professor, member of the Shakespeare Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Dublin.