The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost [Paperback]

Harold Bloom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 7, 2007

This comprehensive anthology attempts to give the common reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The book features a large introductory essay by Harold Bloom called "The Art of Reading Poetry," which presents his critical reflections of more than half a century devoted to the reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves most. In the case of all major poets in the language, this volume offers either the entire range of what is most valuable in their work, or vital selections that illuminate each figure's contribution. There are also headnotes by Harold Bloom to every poet in the volume as well as to the most important individual poems. Much more than any other anthology ever gathered, this book provides readers who desire the pleasures of a sublime art with very nearly everything they need in a single volume. It also is regarded as his final meditation upon all those who have formed his mind.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1008 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (August 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060540427
• ISBN-13: 978-0060540425
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Key Guide to the Pleasure of English Poetry, June 7, 2008

By 

Mr. Hamish Stuart Black "Man of Some Letters" (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (Paperback)

Forty years ago, I found my first important anthology of English Poetry, Ezra Pound's "Confucious to Cummings", in which I discovered the poetry I still consider my first choices in the English language, particularly Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses", and many other poets, including, of course, Cummings. That great critic, Harold Bloom's Anthology has the same feel, a superior range of poets, whose work is of the very best in English verse in his judgement .Most of the poets have extensive, very helpful introductory paragraphs, placing them in their particular age - written by the best teacher - I emphasise that last word - of English Literature to-day. If English Poetry interests you at all, you will hugely enjoy this book - it will give you hour upon hour of intense pleasure, heavy though it is.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars `Poetry is in the first place poetry, a high and ancient art.', July 12, 2008

By 

J. Cameron-Smith "Expect the Unexpected" (ACT, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (Paperback)

Three things caused me to buy this book. The first was the inclusion of two Emily Bronte poems by Professor Bloom: `Stanzas' and `Last Lines'. The second was the inclusion of T S Eliot's `The Wasteland' and the third was that 108 poets are represented in this book.

Professor Bloom selected as his chronological limits Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343 and Hart Crane born in 1899. Within these parameters is a wealth of British and American poetry to cover a wide range of moods and tastes.

There is something intrinsically personal about anthologies of poetry. Those who enjoy poetry will select favourites based on all manner of criteria. My personal criteria owe little to critical objectivity and much more to subjective assessments of evocative language and the metrics of rhythm. So, I've come to love the fierce assertion of the `Last Lines'. Here is the first verse:

`No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;

I see Heaven's glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.'

And also to love, for different reasons the self-doubt echoing through `The Waste Land', which starts with The Burial of the Dead:

`April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.'

It would be remiss of me not to mention some of the other poets included:

Edmund Spenser

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Henry David Thoreau

Thomas Hardy

Wilfred Owen

and 100 others.

Professor Bloom has included an essay on `The Art of Reading Poetry' together with a range of headnotes on poets and poems. If you enjoy poetry anthologies, this may well be a book for your collection as well.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful collection of poetry, August 11, 2008

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (Paperback)

For one reason or another, I have been recently reading (and reviewing) poetry collections--from Romantics on. And a review by one of my Amazon friends led me to purchase and enjoy this collection. The author, Harold Bloom, is an eminent scholar, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow and author of numerous volumes. In his Introduction, he observes that (Page xxvii) "My chronological limits are set by Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343, and Hart Crane, born in 1899." There is a useful introductory essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry," that would be of interest to those who take poetry seriously. As Bloom says (Page 29): "The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes."

But it is the poetry that is at the center of this fat volume (the last poem, by Hart Crane, ends on page 959; I don't know about the reader, but I like big collections of poetry!

In high school, we read Chaucer, and I still remember the first few lines (repeated in this work) of "The Canterbury Tales."

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour."

Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":

"Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods or steepy mountain yields."

There is a healthy collection of Shakespeare, but since I recently reviewed a volume of his sonnets, no need for overkill here. But the selections do represent Shakespeare's art nicely.

Then there is Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison," with the well known final stanza:

"Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage. . . ."

And so many more. . . . Thomas Gray's "Elegy written in a country churchyard" or William Blake's "The Tyger" (I still recall and thrill at the following lines:

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright.

In the forest of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?") to the Romantics' poetry (represented by poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats). Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Lord Tenneyson, the Rossettis, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and so on.

In short, a cornucopia of poetry in the English language tradition. If that is a genre that you enjoy, running from Chaucer to crane, then this volume should suit you nicely.