This is worth reading because there are a handful of great poems and many good ones included in this collection. This collection exposed me to a few poets I did not know previously that I greatly enjoyed. The introduction is interesting and informative but felt more like an essay about the editor's opinions on American poets than a summary of the history of them. It is worth mentioning that it is deeply flawed for this editor to claim this is a thorough overview of all American poets up to 1948 when it does not contain any poets of color (aside from an anonymous "negro spiritual" and an anonymous "negro blues," both of which were, with questionable intent, written in dialect and lacked complexity and nuance) although there were prominent poets of color published at that time (Langson Hughes, Gwnedolyn Brooks, etc). Lastly, I was sometimes frustrated by Rodman's decision to abridge many poems that were not exceedingly long and could have been included in their entirety.