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)

a must have ( )

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. ( )