This second part of The Oxford Book of English Verse introduces the reader to Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the writers of the generation that followed. Especially noteworthy are the riches of the Bard himself, the bluff certainties of Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick’s lyricism, and the contrasting devotional poems of John Donne and George Herbert, though golden lines are plentiful throughout this work. Readers may quite possibly discover that this is their favorite period in English poetry, as many others have before them.