Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019), the late Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, selected the “Best Poems . . .” collection using his most capacious of memories and applying an intellectual tool that he called “the anxiety of influence.” His amazing capacity to hold onto and compare works in multiple dimensions suggests the contents of this book and he implicitly invites the reader to perform that same act of mental enrichment as one of the roles of the reader. Discussion of contents pro or con, admitted or excluded, demands the kind of rich intellectual qualitative problem-solving of which Harold Bloom would approve. ( )

No clarifications of difficult words or annotations ( )

I guess the publisher came up with this book's title: "Poems from England and the United States that I Feel Like Anthologising, with Some Notes on Poets I Hate" would have been more accurate, but isn't as catchy. ( )