[Longenbach] proceeds like a good teacher through many of poetry's essential modes... With healthy quotes from poems that demonstrate the technical and metaphorical values he lauds, Longenbach creates a book that is not literary analysis, but an explanation of how poems work—which might just be enough to get people writing verse. —The Millions

[An] admirable, accessible blend of criticism and how-to instruction... For poets at all levels and every poetry reader.—Booklist

Imagine yourself in an ideal classroom under the spell of an ideal teacher of poetry. That’s what it’s like to keep company with James Longenbach in the pages of How Poems Get Made. Gentle, learned, free-spirited, wide-ranging in taste, Longenbach roams from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the Renaissance to poets reinventing the art in English in our day. —Rosanna Warren