Perhaps it started when one of our earliest ancestors emerged from some forgotten cave grunting praises for the juice of found grapes gone bad. Ever since, we homo sapiens have been praising, condemning, defending, and metaphorically using and abusing wine in our poetry. The wine poem has been around since the inception of verse, leaving us with a collection of poetry that represents a virtual history of the poetic arts: from the lyrics of ancient Greece, accompanied by the ancient lyre, to the birth of free verse, the "prose poem" - and beyond. 160 wine poems from around the world. "Rhyme Makers" from Anacreon to Yeats, including Charles Baudelaire, Amy Lowell, Li Bai, Du Fu, Horace, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lord Byron, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam, Oliver Wendall Holmes, John Keats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton . . . from appellations that cover our globe. THE PERFECT GIFT for the wine enthusiast A MUST ADDITION TO ANY WINE LIBRARY