Editors Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig concentrate on the work of 20 major American poets in Mentor Book of Major American Poets. They include sizable selections from the poetry of:

• Wallace Stevens
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• William Carlos Williams
• Henry Wadsworth
• Ezra Pound
• Walt Whitman
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Emily Dickinson
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Stephen Crane
• e. e. cummings
• Robert Frost
• Hart Crane
• W. H. Auden
• And more...