All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations-in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plath's ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in "Blackberrying" to D. H. Lawrence's lush celebration of "Figs," from the civilized comfort of Noël Coward's "Something on a Tray" to the salacious provocation of Swift's "Oysters," from Li Po on "Drinking Alone" to Baudelaire on "The Soul of the Wine," and from Emily Dickinson's "Forbidden Fruit" to Elizabeth Bishop's "A Miracle for Breakfast," Eat, Drink, and Be Merry serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.