Includes bibliographical references and indexes

Reading a story: Fable, parable, and tales: W. Somerset Maugham -- Aesop -- Grimm -- The Short story: John Updike -- Writing critically -- Writer's perspective -- Point of view: William Faulkner -- Character: Katherine Anne Porter, Alice Walker, Raymond Carver -- Setting: Kate Chopin, Amy Tan -- Tone and style: Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin -- Theme: Chinua Achebe, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -- Symbol: John Steinbeck, Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Tallent, Ursula K. Le Guin -- 2 critical casebooks: Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor -- Stories for further reading: Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Willa Cather, Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Leslie Marmon Silko --

Reading a poem: William Butler Yeats, Adrienne Rich, Robert Frost, Robert Browning, William Stafford -- Listening to a voice: Theodore Roethke, Countee Cullen, Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson Benjamin Alire Saenz, Weldon Kees, Natasha Threthewey, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, James Stephens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, W. h. Auden, Sharon Olds, Sarah N. Cleghorn, Josephine Miles, Thomas Hardy, Wiliam Blake, Richard Lovelace, Wilfred Owen -- Words: Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, John Donne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. V. Cunningham, Carl Sandburg, Robert Herrick, Kay Ryan, Richard Eberhart, Wendy Cope, E. E. Cummings, Billy Collins, Lewis Carroll -- Saying and Suggesting: John Masefield, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Timothy Steele, Walter de la mare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Richard Wilbur --

Imagery: Ezra Pound, Taniguchi Buson, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Simic, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Haiku: Arakida Moritake, Matsuo Basho, Taniguchi Buson, Kobayashi Issa, Suiko Matsushita, Neji Ozawa, Hakuro Wada, Etheridge Knight, Lee Gurga, Penny harter, Jennifer Brutschy, John Ridland, Connie Bensley -- Further study: John Keats, T. E. Hulme, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, H. D., Stevie Smith -- Figures of speech: William Shakespeare, Howard Moss, Sylvia Plath, N. Scott Momaday, James Stephens, Chidiock Tichborne, John Ashbery, Louis MacNeice, Denise Levertov, Jane Kenyon, A. R. Ammons, Robert Burns -- Metaphors -- Song: Ben Jonson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Paul Simon -- Ballads: Dudley Randall -- Blues: Bessie Smith, Clarence Williams, W. H. Auden -- Rap: Run D.M.C. -- John Lennon & Paul McCartney -- Sound: Alexander Pope -- Alliteration and Assonance: A. E. Housman -- Rime: William Cole, Hilaire Belloc, Fred Chappell -- Reading and hearing poems aloud: Michael Stillman, Chryss Yost -- Rhythm: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Dorothy Parker Max Beerbohm, Edna St. Vincent Millay, David Mason -- Closed form: Formal patterns: Robert Graves -- The Sonnet: Kim Addonizio, R. S. Gwynn, A. E. Stallings