The Top 500 Poems

by William Harmon

Overview

The Top 500 Poems offers a vivid portrait of poetry in English, assembling a host of popular and enduring poems as chosen by critics, editors, poets, and general readers. These works speak across centuries, beginning with Chaucer's resourceful inventions and moving through Shakespeare's masterpieces, John Donne's complex originality, and Alexander Pope's mordant satires. The anthology also features perennial favorites such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats; Emily Dickinson's prisms of profundity; the ironies of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot; and the passion of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. These 500 poems are verses that readers either know already or will want to know, encapsulating the visceral power of truly great literature. William Harmon provides illuminating commentary to each work and a rich introduction that ties the entire collection together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231080286
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/10/1992
Series:	Columbia Anthologies
Pages:	1132
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Harmon is the James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the editor of A Handbook to Literature, The Classic Hundred Poems, and The Oxford Book of American Light Verse, and he is the author of several volumes of poetry, including winners of the Lamont Award and the William Carlos Williams Award.

Table of Contents

1 This Is It!
Anonymous (c.1250-c.1350)
7 Cuckoo Song
Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)
8 General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Anonymous (c.1400-1600)
10 Sir Patrick Spens
14 Western Wind
15 Edward, Edward
18 Thomas the Rhymer
21 The Wife of Usher's Well
23 As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham
25 Corpus Christi Carol
26 The Three Ravens
28 Tom o' Bedlam's Song
31 Adam Lay I-bounden
32 Lord Randal
33 The Cherry-Tree Carol
35 The Lord Is My Shepherd
36 I Sing of a Maiden
37 A Lyke-Wake Dirge
39 My Love in Her Attire
40 The Demon Lover
43 Weep You No More, Sad Fountains
44 The Unquiet Grave
46 Waly, Waly
John Skelton (1460-1529)
48 To Mistress Margaret Hussey
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
50 They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek
52 The Lover Complaineth the Unkindness of His Love
54 Whoso List to Hunt
Sir Walter Ralegh (1554-1618)
55 The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
57 The LIe
60 Even Such Is Time
61 The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599)
64 One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand
65 Prothalamion
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
71 With How Sad Steps, O Moon, Though Climb'st the Skies!
72 Leave Me, O Love, Which Reachest But to Dust
73 My True Love Hath My Heart
74 Loving in Truth, and Fain in Verse My Love to Show
75 Come Sleep! O Sleep, the Certain Knot of Peace
George Peele (c.1558-1597)
76 His Golden Locks Time Hath to Silver Turned
78 Whenas the Rye Reach the Chin
Robert Southwell (c.1561-1595)
79 The Burning Babe
Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)
80 Care-Charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night
Michael Drayton (1536-1593)
81 Since There's No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
82 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
84 That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold
86 Shal I Copmare Thee to a Summer's Day?
87 Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
88 Fear No MOre the Heat o' the Sun
89 When Icicles Hang by the Wall
90 Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
91 When to the Sessions of Sweet Siletn Thought
92 O Mistress Mine
93 The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame
94 When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes
95 When Daisies Pied
96 It Was a Lover and His Lass
97 My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun
98 Poor Soul, the Center of My Sinful Earth
99 Hark! Hark! the Lark!
100 Take, O Take Those Lips Away
101 Farewell! Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing
102 Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I
103 When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy
104 Full Many a Glorious Morning Have I Seen
105 No Longer Mourn for Me When I Am Dead
106 Tired with All These, for Restful Death I Cry
107 Like as the Waves Make towards the Pebbled Shore
108 When Daffodils Begin to Peer
109 How like a Winter Hath My Absense Been
110 Since Brass, nor Stone, nor Earth, nor Boundless Sea
111 Come Away, Come Away, Death
112 Come unto These Yellow Sands
113 Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred
Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
114 My Sweet Lesbia
115 Rose-cheeked Laura
116 There Is a Garden in Her Face
117 Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes in the Air
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
118 Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss
120 Spring, the Sweet Spring
Chidiock Tichborne (c.1568-1586)
121 Tichborne's Elegy
Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
123 On His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia
John Donne (1572-1631)
125 Death, Be Not Proud
126 Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God
127 The Good Morrow
128 At the Round EArth's Imagined Corners
129 Go and Catch a Falling Star
131 The Sun Rising
133 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
135 A Hymn to God the Father
136 The Ecstasy
139 The Canonization
141 The Flea
143 Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
145 Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go
147 A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day
149 The Funeral
150 The Apparition
151 The Relic
153 Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
155 The Anniversary
Ben Johnson (1572-1637)
157 Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
158 On My First Son
159 Hymn to Diana
160 Still to Be Neat
161 The Triumph of Charis
163 Epitaph on S.P.
164 Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount, Keep Time with My Salt Tears
165 Come, My Celia, Let Us Prove
166 To Pensburst
John Webster (c.1578-1632)
170 Call for the Robin Redbreast and the Wren
William Browne (c.1590-1645)
171 On the Countess Dowarger of Pembroke
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
172 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
173 Upon Julia's Clothes
174 Delight in Disorder
175 To Daffodils
176 The Argument of His Book
177 Corinna's Going a-Maying
180 The Night-Piece to Julia
181 Grace for a Child
Henry King, Bishop of Chichester (1592-1669)
182 Exequy on His Wife
George Herbert (1593-1633)
186 Love Bade Me Welcome
188 The Collar
190 Virtue
191 The Pulley
192 Redemption
193 Easter Wings
194 Jordan
195 Prayer to the Church's Banquet
Thomas Carew (1595-1639)
196 Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows
198 To My Inconstant Mistress
Sir William Davenant (1606-1668)
199 The Lark Now Leaves His Watery Nest
Edmund Waller (1606-1687)
200 Go, Lovely Rose
202 On a Girdle
John Milton (1608-1674)
203 Lycidas
209 On His Deceased wife
210 On His Blindness
211 On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
212 L'Allegro
217 Il Penseroso
Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)
222 Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?
Anne Bradstreet (c.1612-1672)
223 To My Dear and Loving Husband
Richard Lovlace (1618-1658)
224 To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
225 To Althea, from Prison
227 The Grasshopper
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
229 To His Coy Mistress
231 The Garden
234 The Definition of Love
236 Bermudas
238 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland
242 The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers
244 The Mower to the Glow-Worms
245 A Dialogue between the Soul and Body
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)
247 The Retreat
249 The World
251 They Are All Gone into the World of Light
253 Peace
254 The Night
John Dryden (1631-1700)
256 To the Memory of Mr. Oldham
258 Mac Clecknoe
265 A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
268 Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Music
Edward Taylor (c.1645-1729)
275 Huswifery
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
276 A Description of the Morning
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
277 Know Then Thyself
279 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
291 An Essay on Criticism
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
312 A Short Song of Congratulation
314 On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic
316 The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
327 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
333 Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
William Collins (1721-1759)
335 Ode to Evening
337 How Sleep the Brave
Oliver Goldsmith (c.1730-1774)
338 When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly
339 An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
341 The Deserted Village
William Cowper (1731-1800)
354 Light Shining out of Darkness
356 The Poplar Field
Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
357 The Indian Burying Ground
William Blake (1757-1827)
359 The Tyger
361 London
362 And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time
363 Piping down the Vailleys Wild
364 The Sick Rose
365 The Lamb
366 Ah! Sun-Flower
367 Hear the Voice of the Bard
368 Auguries of Innocence
372 How Sweet I Roam'd from Field to Field
373 The Little Black Boy
375 A Poison Tree
376 The Chimney Sweeper
378 To the Evening Star
379 The Garden of Love
380 The Clod and the Pebble
381 Holy Thursday
382 Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
383 A Red, Red Rose
384 To a Mouse on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785
386 John Anderson, My Jo
387 The Banks o' Doon
388 For A' That and A' That
390 Holy Willie's Prayer
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
394 The World Is Too Much with Us
396 I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
397 Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
398 The Solitary Reaper
400 Ode: Intimations of Imortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
407 Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Lucy (comprising:)
412 She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways
412 I Traveled among Unkown Men
413 Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known
414 Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower
415 A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
416 It Is a Beauteous Evening
417 London, 1802
418 My Heart Leaps Up
419 Surprised By Joy
420 She Was a Phantom of Delight
421 Resolution and Independence
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
426 Proud Maisie
427 Breathes There the Man with Soul So Dead
428 Lochinvar
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
430 Kubla Khan
433 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
458 Dejection: An Ode
463 Frost at Midnight
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
466 The Battle of Blenheim
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
469 Rose Aylmer
470 Dirce
471 I Strove with None, for None Was Worth My Strife
472 Past Ruined Ilion Helen Lives
Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
473 Hohenlinden
Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863)
475 A Visit from St. Nicholas
Leigh Hunt *1784-1859)
477 Jenny Kissed Me
478 Abou Ben Adhem
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824)
479 So We'll Go No More a-Roving
481 She Walks in Beauty
482 The Destruction of Sennacherib
484 When We Two Parted
486 The Ocean
489 There Was a Sound of Revelry by Night
Charles Wolfe (1791-1823)
493 The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
495 Ozymandias
497 Ode to the West Wind
500 To a Skylark
504 Music, When Soft Voices Die
505 To Night
507 England in 1819
508 To _____
509 Adonais
John Clarke (1793-1864)
528 I Am
William Cullen Bryant *1794-1878)
530 To a Waterfowl
532 Thanatopsis
John Keats (1795-1821)
535 To Autumn
537 La Belle Dame sans Merci
539 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Revised Version)
541 On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
542 Ode to a Nightingale
546 Old on a Grecian Urn
548 When I Have Fears
549 Ode on Melancholy
551 The Eve of St. Agnes
565 Bright Star
566 Ode to Psyche
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
569 I Remember, I Remember
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849)
571 Old Adam, the Carrion Crow
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
573 Concord Hymn
574 The Snow-Storm
575 The Rhodora
576 Brahma
577 Fable
578 Days
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
579 How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
580 My Lost Youth
584 Paul Revere's Ride
589 Chaucer
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
590 Barbara Frietchie
593 Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
615 The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful "One Hoss Shay"
620 The Chambered Nautilus
622 Old Ironsides
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
623 To Helen
625 The Raven
631 Annabel Lee
633 The City in the Sea
635 The Bells
639 The Haunted Palace
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892)
641The Splendor Falls
646 Break, Break, Break
644 Crossing the Bar
645 Ulysses
648 The Eagle
649 Tears, Idle Tears
650 Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
651 The Charge of the Light Brigade
654 Mariana
657 The Lady of Shalott
664 Flower in the Crannied Wall
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
665 My Last Duchess
668 Home Thoughts from Abroad
669 Meeting at Night
670 The Year's at the Spring
671 The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church
675 Parting at Morning
676 Two in the Campagna
Edward Lear (1812-1888)
679 The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
681 The Jumblies
Emily Bronte (1818-1848)
684 Remebrance
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)
686 Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
687 The Latest Decalogue
Julia Ward Howe (1819-1892)
688 The Battle Hymn of the Republic
690 A Noiseless Patient Spider
692 O Captain! My Captain!
694 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
704 I Hear America Singing
705 Cavalry Crossing a Ford
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
706 Dover Beach
708 The Scholar-Gipsy
William Allingham (1824-1889)
717 The Fairies
George Meredith (1824-1909)
719 Lucifer in Starlight
720 Thus Piteously Love Closed What He Begat
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
721 The Blessed Damozel
727 The Woodspurge
Emily Dickinson (1860-1886)
728 "Because I could not stop for Death"
730 "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died"
731 "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
732 There's a certain Slant of light"
733 "A Bird came down the Walk"
734 "The Soul selects her own Society"
735 "I like to see it lap the Miles"
736 "My life closed twice before its close"
737 "Success is counted sweetest"
738 "I taste a liquor never brewed"
739 "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"
740 "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
741 "I never saw a Moor"
742 "Much Madness is divinest Sense"
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)
743 When I Am Dead
744 Up-Hill
745 A Birthday
746 Remember
"Lewis Carroll" (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
747 Jabberwocky
749 The Walrus and the Carpenter
753 Father William
755 I'll Tell Thee Everything I Can
758 How Doth the Little Crocodile
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911)
759 The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
763 When the Hounds of Spring Are on Winter's Traces
766 The Garden of Prosperpine
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
770 The Darkling Thrush
772 The Oxen
773 In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"
774 Channel Firing
776 Afterwards
777 The Convergence of the Twain
779 The Man He Killed
780 Neutral Tones
781 The Ruined Maid
783 The Voice
784 Durgaing Wind and Rain
Robert Bridges (1844-1930)
786 London Snow
788 Nightingales
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
789 Pied Beauty
790 The Windhover
792 God's Grandeur
793 Spring and Fall
794 Felix Randal
795 No Worst, There Is None
796 Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
797 Spring
798 Heaven-Haven
799 Inversnaid
800 The Habit of Perfection
802 Carrion Comfort
Eugene Field (1850-1895)
803 Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
805 The Duel
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
807 Requiem
Edwin Markham (1852-1904)
808 The Man with the Hoe
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
810 The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936)
833 Loveliest of Trees
834 To an Athlete Dying Young
836 With Rue My Heart Is Laden
837 When I Was One-and-Twenty
838 Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
841 Into My Heart an Air That Kills
842 On Wenlock Edge
843 The Hound of Heaven
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
849 Recessional
851 Danny Deever
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
853 The Second Coming
855 Sailing to Byzantium
857 Leda and the Swan
858 The Lake Isle of Innisfree
859 When You Are Old
860 Among School Children
863 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
864 Easter, 1916
867 The Wild Swans at Coole
869 The Circus Animals' Desertion
871 A Prayer for My Daughter
874 Lapis Lazuli
876 The Song of Wandering Aengus
877 No Second Troy
Gelett Burgess (1866-1951)
878 The Purple Cow
Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)
879 Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae
880 Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
881 Anne Rutledge
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
882 Mr. Flood's Party
885 Miniver Cheevy
887 Richard Cory
888 Eros Turannos
890 For a Dead Lady
891 Luke Havergal
William Henry Davies (1871-1940)
893 Leisure
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
896 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
897 Mending Wall
899 Fire and Ice
900 The Road Not Taken
901 Birches
903 After Apple-Picking
905 Acquainted with the Night
906 Provide, Provide
907 The Gift Outright
908 Directive
910 Design
John Masefield (1878-1967)
911 Cargoes
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
912 Chicago
914 Fog
915 Cool Tombs
916 Grass
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
917 The Owl
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
918 Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
920 Sunday Morning
925 Anecdote of the Jar
926 The Emperor of Ice-Cream
927 The Idea of Order at Key West
929 Peter Quince at the Clavier
932 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
935 The Red Wheelbarrow
936 The Dance
937 Spring and All
939 The Yachts
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
941 Piano
942 Snake
946 Bavarian Gentians
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
948 The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
950 In a Station of the Metro
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
951 The Soldier
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962
952 Hurt Hawks
954 Shine, Perishing Republic
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
955 Poetry
957 A Grave
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
959 Still Falls the Rain
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
961 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
966 Journey of the Magi
968 The Waste Land
982 Sweeney among the Nightingales
984 Gerontion
987 Little Gidding
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)
995 Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter
997 Piazza Piece
Claude McKay (1890-1948)
998 If We Must Die
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
999 Break of Day in the Trenches
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)
1001 You, Andrew Marvell
1003 Ars Poetica
1005 The End of the World
Wilfred Own (1893-1918)
1006 Anthem for Doomed Youth
1007 Dulce et Decorum Est
1008 Strange Meeting
1010 Greater Love
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962)
1011 anyone lived in a pretty how town
1013 "next to of course god america i"
Hart Crane (1899-1832)
1014 To Brooklyn Bridge
Allen Tate (1899-1879)
1017 Ode to the Confederate Dead
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
1021 The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
1022 Not Waving But Drowning
Richard Eberhart (b.1904)
1023 The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
1024 The Groundhog
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
1026 Musee des Beaux Arts
1028 In Memory of W.B. Yeats
1031 Lullaby
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
1033 Bagpipe Music
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
1035 My Papa's Waltz
1036 I Knew a Woman
1038 The Waking
1039 Elegy for Jane
1040 In a Dark Time
Sir Stephen Spender (b.1909)
1041 I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
1043 The Fish
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
1046 Those Winter Sundays
Randall Jarrell (1914-1986)
1048 Naming of Parts
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
1050 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
1052 Fern Hill
1054 A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
1056 The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
Gwendolyn Brooks (b.1917)
1057 We Real Cool
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
1058 Skunk Hour
1061 For the Union Dead
1064 Mr. Edward and the Spider
Richard Wilbur (b.1921)
1066 Love Calls Us to the things of This World
Philip Larkin (1922-1985
1068 Church Going
Allen Ginsberg (b.1926)
1071 A Supermarket in California
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
1073 Daddy
1077 The Poems in Order of Popularity
1093 Acknowledgements
1099 Index of Poets
1105 Index of Titles and First Lines

What People are Saying About This

Joel Conarroe

"Hail, Columbia! Your Top 500 Poems is like a huge gathering of one's oldest and dearest friends, agreeably hosted by William Harmon, who wittily sees that everyone has a good time. It's hard to imagine a more delightful party." -Joel Conarroe, critic and anthologist

Editorial Reviews

The Top 500 Poems is intriguing in concept and management, and most of us will want to own it. And for this we are grateful.

Gwendolyn Brooks

A revealing snapshot of one aspect of Western civilization, even including a list of the poems in order of popularity.

Globe and Mail

It is rare indeed to come across a book in which wisdom and love come together as powerfully as they do for William Harmon.

John Frederick Nims

The merriest poetry anthology of the past decade.... It's everything from 'Sumer is icumen in' to Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' with terse, plain, and rather wonderful commentary by Harmon.

Buffalo News

If your library can buy only one volume of poetry, let this be it.

Booklist

If your library can buy only one volume of poetry, let this be it.

Booklist

A revealing snapshot of one aspect of Western civilization, even including a list of the poems in order of popularity.

Globe & Mail

YA-- A chronological compilation that tells ``the story of poetry in English.'' Harmon enhances each entry with pertinent information about the work and the poet; his insight adds much to the enjoyment of the collection. The selections are taken from the ninth edition of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry , chosen because 400 contemporary editors, critics, and poets included them most often in their own anthologies. ``The Poems in Order of Popularity'' concludes the book. Easy-to-read print with a look of fine calligraphy on high-quality paper add to the appeal.-- Arlene Hoebel, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA

School Library Journal

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. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

In the introduction, Harmon boldly proclaims, "This is it!" He is right. The task he set for himself was to compile an anthology with which anyone could start to gain a familiarity with poetry in English. He has nobly done yeoman's work in selecting and commenting upon the 500 poems that have been anthologized most often, based on the 400 collections indexed in the ninth edition of "The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry". Harmon is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina and edited "The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry" and the "Oxford Book of American Light Verse". He also coedited the fifth edition of "A Handbook to Literature" Represented in "The Top 500 Poems" are 160 poets. Shakespeare has 29 entries. Anonymous has 21, Donne has 19, Blake has 18, and Dickinson and Yeats each have 14. Harmon justifies the fact that "three-quarters of the poems are British . . . because British poetry has been with us three times as long as American poetry." Coverage spans six centuries, ranging from Chaucer in the Middle Ages to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. The nineteenth century contributed the greatest number of poems (169), with the twentieth century second with 122 The format is attractive. The paper is of high quality, margins are wide, and the poetry is in dark, readable print. Each poet is introduced with a short paragraph in small print with just enough data to pique curiosity. Comments by Harmon, in yet a different font, follow the selections. He writes with a sly sense of humor, describing alliteration as "sliding along the slippery slope of selfsame sounds." The entries for poets are in chronological order, and a detailed table of contents and a name index provide additional access points. An index of titles and first lines is included, as well as an appendix that ranks the poems according to the number of times they have been anthologized All types of libraries will be interested in this volume as a basic anthology of poetry in English. It will be welcome in elementary and secondary school library media centers, public library poetry and reference collections, home libraries, and as a gift. If your library can buy only one volume of poetry, let this be it.

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