Based on an enormously successful exhibition at The New York Public Library, The Hand of the Poet draws the reader into the real world of the poet - ink spots, tobacco stains, and all - by presenting a wide range of working drafts, letters, diary entries, photographs, and memorabilia. One hundred writers from the seventeenth century to the present day are represented.

Biographies and portraits of each poet - alongside manuscripts of such legendary works as Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" and W. H. Auden's "Stop All the Clocks" - make up a mosaic that offers powerful and often surprising revelations of the person behind the poem. Illustrated with over three hundred black-and-white photographs, The Hand of the Poet is for those new to poetry as well as those for whom poetry has been a life-long passion.