William HarmonReseñas

The Classic Hundred Poems are presented grouped by author; the authors are ordered more or less chronologically. I have no opinion on the choices made, but noticed that fragments of many of the poems were familiar to me; I must have encountered them, quoted, sometimes not explicitly, in other works. The commentary on the poems and the lives of the poets often seemed shallow, while some of the readings seemed to me rather poor, almost irritating. I enjoyed the recording anyway, quite a lot. Even where I do not enjoy the poems, they have some historical interest. Sometimes, when I already knew the poem, but nothing much about it, I learned a bit more.½

4/16/22

Authoritative, but I'm just not a poetry person.

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.

This is a somewhat bountiful book about the history and the nature and the practitioners of poetry. It seems to offer a point of view for every taste. It is an eye-opening primer for a new student of poetry.
In his introduction, Harmon says:
“…In none of [these] documents is poetry as such distinguished very crisply from prose…
Poetry resists absolute definitions…Rhyme, for example, has been an incidental blemish of prose in many literatures, especially those of classical antiquity…in time, however, in the poetry of Europe, rhyme turned into an ornament so important that ‘rhyme’ itself virtually came to mean ‘poem’…”
But before that happened, “…during the Middle Ages…rhymed accentual verse was introduced for certain religious texts set to music, but rhyme was so alien to true poetry, according to many conservatives, that such texts were called ‘proses.’ “
Indeed, poetry resists a commonly accepted definition.
Wordsworth offered this:
“…all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity (sic)…”
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) said:
“The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit…”
If you can read the following quote without quivering, there is no need for you to pick up Harmon’s collection.
From Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586):
“But if…you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry…”
I trust you will join me in pledging to do everything possible to sing poetry to such of our fellow creatures as suffer the burden of an earth-creeping mind, yea, as we feel their hurt and wish them no ill, but rather the complex rapture of the sunset.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/
http://magisterlibrorum.blogspot.com/

I have used this book in large ammounts of my literature studies at the university, and despite bing an old edition it still holds key terms to make studies just a little easier on students.

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'

This is a fantastic resource for English teachers and students. Most entries are easily accessible for students at the college level.

Long before David Letterman, I was a sucker for “top ten” lists. Best sellers, the hit parade, NCAA football, the top ten news stories of . . . whatever year. When the senior Arthur Schlesinger surveyed historians in 1948, ranking US Presidents, I was just a kid, but I inscribed the results on my mental Mt. Rushmore (Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson were the top five). Every list of the top 100 films of all time grabs my attention, from AFI up and down. It’s almost as much fun to argue with the rankings as to try to figure out the criteria – what makes a great film great.

So I love books like this one: Thomas Harmon, The Classic Hundred: All-Time Favorite Poems (Columbia UP, c1990). Of course, there are lots of anthologies of “old favorite” poems, like “Casey at the Bat,” “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” and maybe Poe’s “The Raven.” At the other extreme would be those that achieve critical acclaim and voluminous scholarly analysis, like John Donne’s “Canonization” or T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In between are those that are quotable, recitable, teachable, making it into the “canon” of school and university textbooks; e.g., Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Emily Dickinson’s “I never saw a moor,” Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” even Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” the version she wrote before she revised it almost out of existence.

Harmon’s book is one of the best of the best, hence making it into my “top ten” poetry anthologies. He doesn’t rely on his own judgment or upon a survey of literary critics. He uses Granger’s © Index of anthologized poems in English. Harmon edits the poems, introduces them, and speculates on why they made the list, but he does not select them. Please note: though my review is listed under this one volume, it actually will range back and forth between this one, based on the ninth edition of Granger’s and two others: a second edition based on Granger’s eighth, ninth, and tenth editions (Columbia UP, c1998) and an expanded version, The Top 500 Poems (Columbia UP , c1992).

Now before you read any further, stop a few minutes and make your own list. You can play this game either of two ways: what are your ten favorite poems written in English OR what would you guess are the top ten most anthologized poems in English? And while you’re at it, you might want to do the same thing with poets: your ten favorites and/or your prediction of the ten that have the most anthologized poems.

Of course, any such list is ultimately subjective. Though Harmon chooses strictly on the basis of statistics, those anthologies indexed in Granger’s were based on subjective decisions, influenced by the editors’ times, their backgrounds, their own personal taste. Furthermore, Granger’s had to decide which anthologies to include in its index. It’s very comprehensive, I can assure you; even so, established presses and editors get more attention than newcomers, and anthologies representing literary periods, traditions, established masters, and genres probably outweigh thematic anthologies as well as postmodern ones and more idiosyncratic ones. So, as you might expect, not many contemporary poets make it, even in the extended list of 500. Sylvia Plath is the youngest (she was born in 1932), and only five were living at the time of publication in 1992 (Richard Eberhart, Sir Stephen Spender, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Ginsburg). Right away half a dozen of my favorites are eliminated: no Ted Hughes, no Howard Nemerov or James Dickey, no Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Wendell Berry. So relax and think of this as an anthology of traditional, pre-modern poetry. As such, it’s damned good!

Emily Dickinson is the only woman represented in the top 100; there are only ten in the collection of 500 poems. No ethnic minorities in the 100 (unless you count a couple of Irishmen as minorities): only Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks among the 500, each with only one poem. But the biggest surprise – and disappointment – in the Classic 100 is that Walt Whitman is missing. Still he’s the #1 American poet in influence and critical recognition and, many would argue, also in quality, versatility, and thematic significance. That brings up a limitation of this method of anthologizing. Some poets have only a few poems that have made it into the “canon”; hence, these few poems are the ones of theirs that are almost always anthologized; for example, the Cavalier poets and their contemporaries, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Sucklling, even Andrew Marvell. On the other hand, some poets (like Whitman) have so many poems that are widely recognized that anthologists vary in which ones they choose; hence, no one poem of Whitman's makes it.

So here you have it: the poets with the most works anthologized in the Classic 100 (first edition). With apologies to David Letterman, I list them in reverse order -- more or less.

10. Emily Dickinson (4)
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
7. William Wordsworth
Gerard Manley Hopkins
3. William Blake (5)
John Keats
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
William Butler Yeats
2. John Donne (6)
1. William Shakespeare (8)

About the same in the second edition, though the numbers are different and four other poets are tied for tenth place (Ben Jonson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Dylan Thomas). Emily is still the only woman and the only American.

The top ten poems in the first edition are

10. Robert Herrick, To Virgins, to Make Much of Time “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may . . . .”
9. John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci
8. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
6. Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
5. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
4. William Shakesoeare, Sonnet 73 “That time of year thou mayest in me behold . . . .”
3. John Keats, To Autumn
2. Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens

And – ta-da –

1. William Blake, The Tyger

So how did you score?

Except for the omission of Whitman and Frost from the poets, I would be willing to accept that list. If I were to include a Victorian it would be Browning instead of Tennyson.

The poems are a different matter. My favorite Shakespearean sonnet would be #116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments.” My favorite Keats would be “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and as much as I love many of his poems, probably my other favorite favorite is the sonnet, “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.” I love much of Hopkins, but my favorite would be “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” (“Margaret, are you grieving / over goldengrove unleaving?”). My favorite Frost would also be a sonnet: “Design” (“I found a dimpled spider, fat and white….”). And I could never omit Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death…,” nor Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son,” nor T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Nor Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” nor Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” nor Wendell Berry’s “The Wheel.” But then, obviously, I could never stop with ten either.

As I said, one of the most fun things about lists of “top ten” or 100 or 500 is arguing with the lists. That said, these anthologies are all keepers. If I had to choose only one for the proverbial desert isle, and big fat comprehensive anthologies like Norton’s were ruled out (as they definitely should be), I would probably choose the Classic 100, but I’d have to sneak one or two contemporary volumes in my backpack, too.

Just to prove to you what pleasure this collection can bring the reader, let me direct you to the last three poems, #98 and #99 and #100.

Emily Dickinson writes “A narrow fellow in the grass,” as if she had once been “a Boy, and Barefoot” as I once was, seeing a snake unbraiding in the sun like a whiplash. She concludes with a stanza that captures my reaction exactly:

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone –

As a young man, William Butler Yeats translated, or adapted, a sixteenth-century French poem by Pierre Ronsard, “Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir á la chandelle,” addressing it no doubt to the woman he loved and lost. Here’s the first stanza:

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep . . . .

And those eighth graders I taught all those years ago – who put together their own anthology, called The Adventures of a Purple Aardvark because it was printed and illustrated on a purple ditto master – those eighth graders would never accept an anthology without #100, “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare:

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor . . . .

Who was that Traveler? And just who were those listeners? Every eighth grader I taught could come up with explanations eerier than you can imagine. But, after all, that’s what good poetry can do, isn’t it? Stir up the imagination? Evoke reality beyond reality? Or within? Or beside it?

Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake . . . .

Well, I am old and gray now, but when I take down this book and read, I still feel Emily’s “tighter breathing,” I still dream of that “soft look” Yeats speaks of, and I still listen as de la Mare said his listeners did:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Harmon tells a story that captures the ultimate significance of the sounds – and the silences – of poetry:

“Thomas Hardy, according to his widow’s account of his last days, at the end ‘could no longer listen to the reading of prose, though a short poem now and again interested him. In the middle of one night he asked his wife to read aloud to him “The Listeners,” by Walter de la Mare."'

In all three of these anthologies – whichever one you choose – there will be a wealth of poems, when the darkness begins to fall, that will awake your imagination, refresh you memory, comfort you in your sleeplessness, and saturate you in the sounds and silences of good poetry.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
. . . .
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –

I was made to buy this in my first Lit Crit class as an undergrad and, although we never directly used it in the class, this has been one of the most valuable books I collected in college!

The poems here are good, as is the paper they are written on. The commentary, however, can only be described as weird. The authors insistence on naming the rhyme scheme, for example, is strange and the random facts he chooses to note about the various authors are more distracting in places than helpful. I certainly do not agree with the rankings that picked these poems for inclusion in this book of all-time favorites, but the book provides a engaging sample of poems and some are sure to be favorites.

excellent source for our poetry projects

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.

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)

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.

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. - Arlene Hoebel, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA

From Book News, Inc.
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.

Here, for the first time, is our generations' definitive view of the greatest poetry in the English language. This is the story of poetry in English, a collection of the best 500 poems, based not on one critic's choice, not on one poet's choice, but on the collective choice of 550 critics, editors, and poets. Here are the 500 poems that speak to us across the centuries, beginning with Chaucer's words, moving to Shakespeare's masterpieces, through Donne's wonderful witticisms and Pope's elegant satires, through the perennial favorites of Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, on through Dickinson's jewels of profundity to the ironies of Eliot and to the passion of Plath and Ginsberg in out own time. These are the 500 poems we know or want to know, arranged as an unfolding story of great literature, with comments on each by William Harmon and with a general introduction on the entire collection.