Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another. Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us.

Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy.

In the volumes of this series we take a look through the prism of individual regions of the United States through the centuries and decades.

The United States may be many things: the world's policeman, a bully, a shameless purveyor of mass market culture but it also, in its better moments, a standard bearer for truth, transparency, equality and the more positive qualities of democracy.

Little wonder that's its poets are rightly acknowledged as wonders of their art. Leading lights in the fight against slavery and for equality, even if the rest of the Nation is finding it problematic to catch up.

In this volume we have collected verse from poets born in the Mid-West. This huge and mythic landscape that stretches from Chicago and the Great Lakes to the deserts of Texas contains a wealth of poets that could summon theme and words to describe and reveal both nature and humanity in sprawling yet intimate detail. Among their number are Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Vachel Lindsay, Alice Corbin and Ambrose Bierce, brilliant wordsmiths one and all.