About this series

Great Poets of the World, an eight-part series, chronicles the greatest poets of the ages and their works – lyrical, spiritual and avant-garde. Beginning with a special one-hour episode about the poetry of William Shakespeare, the series moves to Spanish poets Jimenez, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Paz and Borges; poets of the European continent Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Rilke and Brodsky; the poets who wrote in English from 1308 to the present (in four parts) from Chaucer to Heaney; and poets of the Middle East and Asia, including Rumi, Basho and Gibran.