This introductory programme establishes the continuity and variety of poetry over six centuries, touching on different genres by using extracts from some of the many poems featured in the series - from Chaucer to Ted Hughes.

A look at the poetry composed between the mid-seventh century and the Norman Conquest, including Julian Glover's reading of part of his own adaptation of the heroic epic Beowulf.

This programme explores the late Medieval period leading into the Renaissance, discussing poems dealing with love, death and ambition by Skelton, Wyatt, Raleigh, Marlowe and Shakespeare.

The vigour and audacity of John Donne's love poetry is contrasted with his equally powerful devotional works. The programme then explores the work of Donne's disciple George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell.

An overview of the great age of satire: among the works featured are Rochester's 'A Satire Against Reason and Mankind', Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel' and the mock-heroic 'MacFlecknoe', and Pope's masterpiece of mordant wit, 'The Dunciad'.

This programme features excerpts from Jonathan Smart's 'Jubilate Agno', written in Bedlam, five poems by Blake, Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', and Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper' - a fine example of "emotion recollected in tranquillity".

'Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Daffodils', 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal', and an extract from Book I of 'The Prelude' are among the poems read by Julian Glover; all were filmed in Wordsworth's native Lake District.

The Victorian period of richly represented with extracts of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Agernon Charles Swinburne.

This programme covers verse of the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century, with poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley, A.E. Houseman and Rudyard Kipling.

Anthony Hopkins reads two of Dylan Thomas' most widely known poems, and Stacy Keach reads Robert Lowell's 'For the Union Dead'; poetry by Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes close the series.