"The chapters of this book form an essay in a type of history I call 'verse history,' a concept not covered by any of the usual terms applied to the study of literature. Verse history is the history of a tradition of composing poems in a certain meter. It is distinct from literary history, because two works from one genre, place, or time, even two works by one poet, may be in different meters. The inverse is also true, in that verse history can connect poems from very different local contexts. The relationship between Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" and a twenty-first-century sonnet on supercomputers is more general than literary influence, a genre, or a school" --