The Top 500 Poems (Columbia Anthologies)

New
Hardcover
1992
$33.27

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.

Synopsis

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.

$33.27

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 1164
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 30 Nov 1992
ISBN 10: 023108028X
ISBN 13: 9780231080286
Book Overview: 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.

Media Reviews

If your library can buy only one volume of poetry, let this be it. Booklist 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, poet A revealing snapshot of one aspect of Western civilization, even including a list of the poems in order of popularity. Globe and Mail 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 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, coauthor of Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry

Author Bio

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.