Poets and artists have always looked to birds for inspiration. In this collection Audubon's iconic birds illuminate, as well as illustrate, the poems. Since the poets and the painters represented are among the greatest who have ever lived, their joint celebration of a common theme has resulted in an enchanting book to cherish for years to come.

Amongst the poets whose work is included are Rossetti, Chaucer, Blake, Shakespeare, and Milton; Cowper, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley; twentieth-century writers, among them Hardy, Yeats, de la Mare, Laurie Lee, and Ted Hughes; and such American poets as Thoreau, Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Theodore Roethke.