The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry's relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift's "Stella" poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume.

The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard's Eighteenth-century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, second edition, 2004).