This dissertation advances a new history of early modern English poetry by recovering how gathered poems began to be read as books. It argues that the collection of short poems came into focus as a site of invention during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one moment in which print expanded and consolidated habits of lyric gathering. As an artifact of the interactions between diverse textual agents, the development of the poetry collection charts the contours of the book as a conceptual shape that was emerging in response to the material forms of print. With this focus on the collection, I recover a habit of mind that has remained somewhat hidden, perhaps due to critical unease with an imaginative reading of paratexts. My project shows these organizational structures, on the contrary, to be uniquely expressive of the point at which the framing capacities of stationers meet those of poets. Early modern readers consistently located meaning not only in single poems, but also in editorial devices that directed how poems were to be interpreted within larger collections. By illuminating this broad spectrum of textual activity, which incorporated the materiality of early printed books into ongoing experiments with poetic form, I rethink basic cultural and aesthetic formations and restore visibility to multiple new trajectories in literary history. My study begins with Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes (1557), a volume that provided an unprecedented model for the relationship between poems and printed books. The opening chapters focus on early multi-author poetry collections and the creative imitation of those editions by George Gascoigne and Isabella Whitney in the 1570s. A third chapter, on The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), explains how Edmund Spenser sought to counter this editorial paradigm by figuring organization as poetic labor. The two final chapters, on the coterie manuscripts of John Donne's poems (1630s) and a late reissue of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) as Shakespeare's Poems (1640), highlight the diffuse afterlife of Tottel's organizational practices, through which the diverse efforts of poets, publishers, and readers took over an editorial function that had become fundamental to literary production.