One of the distinguishing features of Napoleon Hill’s books is how often he turned to poetry to illuminate a concept or help make a point about becoming a success. Today most business consultants would have difficulty quoting rhyming lines from anything that wasn’t on Top 40 radio, and few of those lyrics would offer much in the way of inspiration. But when Hill went to school, memorizing verse was as common as learning to add, and many of the poems he learned by heart celebrated ideals such as personal responsibility, initiative, teamwork, heroism, and overcoming adversity—the very concepts that later in life Hill would write about in his books.

It was Napoleon Hill’s use of poetry that suggested the idea of compiling Poems That Inspire You to Think and Grow Rich, and it is the poems that Napoleon Hill used in his books that form the basis of this collection. In addition, the editors have selected other works by inspirational writers such as Edgar Guest, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Jessie Rittenhouse, as well as the classics including Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, and Shakespeare.

The poems are assembled into ten chapters, and each of the chapters is titled after the principle of success to which it is most closely related. In addition to the ten chapters of poems, the final section is devoted to eight short essays that readers have most often identified as their favorite passages written by Napoleon Hill.