The Top 500 Poems

by William Harmon (Editor)

Paperback, 1992

Status

Available

Call number

821.008

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Columbia University Press (1992), Edition: Fifth Edition, 1132 pages

Description

The pop title is right out of Billboard (the publisher must think poetry needs all the crossover it can get), but the collection is quite terrific--not necessarily the greatest poems (best to avoid that can of worms), but the 500 English-language poems that have appealed most often to 400 contemporary editors, critics, and poets for inclusion in their own widely disparate anthologies, which were indexed in the Ninth Edition of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. From the famous pre-Chaucerian, Anonymous (c.1250-c.1350), author of "Cuckoo Song", to Plath and Ginsberg, the only problem with this anthology will be putting it down.

User reviews

LibraryThing member nbmars

According to the editor, these are the 500 poems that have been anthologized most often. Three-quarters of the poems are British, and more are penned by Shakespeare than any other author (Anonymous coming in second, followed by Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Tennyson, Hardy,

Frost, and Keats). The majority of poems are from the nineteenth century. Aside from statistics, the poems herein tend to be poems people "get." (These are not necessary the "best" poems according to David Kirby, writing in "Why, Poetry?" (American Interest Online, July-August 2007), who notes that "if it works, a poem is more likely to be half understood rather than fully comprehended. After all...a poem tends to have one foot in the unconscious and one in the sunshine. ...failing to understand is a crucial part of the experience of reading poetry...") Instead, we read "The Tiger" (number one in popularity), "How Do I Love Thee: Let Me Count the Ways," "Old Ironsides," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Kubla Khan," "Dover Beach," "Jabberwocky," "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening," and a myriad of other old favorites: 492 more, to be exact). It is like pulling out an old yearbook; a book that is fun to revisit from time to time, causing you to smile from the memory of making your acquaintance with those old friends.
(JAF)

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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

If you can get beyond the whole concept of the top 500 poems then this is a delightful book in many ways. Certainly it is appealing to have great poetry collected for easy access. And it's probably not possible to read this without at least a bit of playing along and second-guessing. You have to

wonder how some of the poems made it into the collection; contrariwise, you also are beset with curiosity about the absence of others. In the end, just enjoy the poems and let it be. Perhaps, edit and compile your own listing, defending them against all comers.

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LibraryThing member melannen

This book's top ten (most-anthologized) poems in English (as of 1992) are by Blake, Keats, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Frost, Herrick, Marvell, Marlowe, Donne, and Lovelace.

LibraryThing's top-ten (most-owned) poetry books (as of January, 2006) are by Whitman, Silverstein, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg,

Chaucer, Stevens, Plath, Milton, and Stevenson. More-or-less.

Frankly, the second list sounds like more fun.

Spurious statistics aside, this is an excellent anthology of English verse, and contains pretty much all the poetry that one ought to be meant to know - and it's all, by every standard, great stuff, right up to the purple cow; I've spent many a rainy evening poring over it and singing it to myself. All the same, it often starts to read like my high school English book.

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LibraryThing member cynsimo5

So I can't really finish this - I keep rereading my favorites like 'the red wheel barrow' My Papa's Waltz' and 'Love Calls Us to the Things of This World'

LibraryThing member datrappert

You won't agree with all the choices, but it's hard to beat this for a poetry anthology that isn't too heavy to lift.

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