Poetry and Humanity develops and expands the MCT poetics program and is built on a theme of understanding humanity and our existence. It shows how poets push language to its maximum in order to express those things about humanity that are most true, or difficult, or subtle. Longer and more challenging poems are used as examples.All of the topics from the previous volumes are included in this one, but more advanced techniques are also explored. These include advanced rhymes such as half-double rhyme, elided rhyme, amphisbaenic rhyme, reverse rhyme, and apophany; advanced meters, from monometer to octameter; complex stanza forms, such as heroic couplets, terza rima, villanelles, quintets, sestets, octets, and submerged sonnets; and more involved figures of speech, including metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons. The poems featured in the book are by such immortal poets as Thomas Hardy, William Blake, William Shakespeare, Henry Longfellow, Algernon Swinburne, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, William Cowper, Thomas Wyatt, William Wordsworth, and G.K. Chesterton.Like he has done with the other poetics books in this series, Michael beautifully illustrates the idea that poetry is not an art for the elite only. There are poems for everyone, and they can be lovely, or gritty, or heartbreaking, or amusing. And the best of them contain elements that make them memorable as well.