William Harmon

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. show more 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 – show less

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 show more 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/ show less

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. show more 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. show less

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.