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(More customer reviews)I like to buy this book as a present for people I like because I know I can hardly go wrong. (Forget the Godiva chocolates or the Heitz Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon: this will last!) Whether one is a wannabe rap master from Watts or a distinguished professor of English lit at the Sorbonne, there will be something here to please, I promise.
It should be emphasized that this is a collection of strictly English language poetry, which means, for example, that none of verses from Edward Fitzgerald's very English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam appears even though some of those verses are among the most popular and the most anthologized. It should also be noted that this is not a contemporary collection (copyright date, 1992) so there's no Gary Soto or Rita Dove or Louise Gluck or even Margaret Atwood. It should also be pointed out that if you're looking into Keats's, e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale," for the first time, perhaps this is not the best place to find it since none of the poems are explicated. Editor William Harmon does give a brief note as an introduction to each poet, and concludes each poem with a brief comment.
The collection is popular of course and spans English poetry from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath but there's nary a ditty to be found. Although T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is here (hurrah!), there's nothing from his Book of Practical Cats (alas) and no Kipling's "If"! This is really high class stuff, quite simply the best. All the giants are here, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, Andrew Marvell, Frost, Yeats, Dickinson, etc., etc. Some moderns are represented, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, etc., although notably absent is Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Harmon's method of selection was to peruse anthologies and include those poems most often making an appearance. Of course it's obvious that some editorial decisions were made. I have little doubt that Kipling's "If" really is among the 500 most anthologized poems, although it doesn't appear here, and ditto for Robert Service and his very popular, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But perhaps this is just as well since those poems really are easily found elsewhere. The admirable point that Harmon is making with this collection is that one can include in a popular book the great poems of the language even though some of them are "difficult." In this category there's Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and others. Harmon also does not shy away from poems often left out of anthologies because of length. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is here in toto and so is Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Of course not everything is here, and one can indeed find fault. There can be differences of opinion, and it is very true that a collection based on other collections will indeed leave out some great poems and poets. Amy Lowell does not appear, meaning that her "Patterns," one of the great poems in the language, is not here. John Crowe Ransom's "Blue Girls," one of my personal favorites is apparently not much anthologized; at least it doesn't appear here. And I was surprised at only two selections from e. e. cummings (and neither one was "plato told him"!).
But this is to nitpick. This is a great collection and more than that it is beautifully edited. The poems are presented chronologically, beginning with the anonymous "Cuckoo Song." There is an index of titles and first lines, which is the way it should be. (Some editors fail to include titles in such an index, but we think of both when trying to recall...) There is an index of poets, and finally the 500 poems are listed in order of popularity. William Blake's "The Tiger" is number one. (For some reason Harmon modernized Blake's spelling of "Tyger.") Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is the most anthologized poem by an American. Even Harmon's short introduction, which he titles "This is it!" is well worth reading. Therein one discovers that Shakespeare is the poet with the most poems included (29), followed by Donne (19), Blake (18) and Dickinson and Yeats (14).
Here (as a public service) I was going to explicate Donne's charming but tricky (and a wee bit sexist) "Go and Catch a Falling Star" (an apt choice because Harmon has "I" instead of the poet's intended "If," a typo at the beginning of line nine) but I'm running out of space, and besides poets hate to be explicated.
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