From Poetry to History offers twenty-five selected papers by the leading Latin scholar A. J. Woodman, and focuses on Latin poetry and historiography from the mid-first century BC to the early second century AD.

Most of the papers represent close readings of individual poems or passages of text. The authors principally featured are Catullus, Horace, and especially Tacitus, but there are also treatments of Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Augustus' Res Gestae, Velleius, and the younger Pliny.

The volume includes four papers not previously published, as well as an epilogue which discusses some of the issues raised.