Customer Reviews

The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost

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I was a bit surprised when I first skimmed through the book, mainly from the stopping point selection at Hart Crane, born in 1899. I was looking foward to Bloom consolidating some of the 20th century for me, but it wasn't to be. After I sulked a while and started reading, I have found it to be one of, if not, his most approachable and rewarding book (and I have about thirteen of his latter books). What I found especially rereadable and delightful is his essay--"The Art of Reading Poetry," which is in the beginning 30 pages, divided in 8 sections. Bloom takes a very practical approach towards READING poetry and gives some advice that reminds me of his assumed heir: Helen Vendler. For instance HB says we should ask ourselves 4 questions when reading a poem. The first, (roughly from memory) is what does the poem mean, and is that meaning clearly attained. Next, can we deem the poem as simply good, or is it intrinsically well-crafted. And finally does this poem transcend its time or is it a period piece? There are other nuggets that I strongly believe will make their way into anthologies across America in due time, probably once the obtuse personality of Bloom fades and we are left with just his passion and wisdom for literature.
There are also introductory essays before the authors that offer us bio information, but of special interest and relevance. Just this morning I read that Willaim Blake and his wife, after a struggling marriage in the beginning, lived the rest of their life in contentment, by all accounts.
As a potential buyer, don't be scared of another technical, verbose, theoretical book. And don't think BLoom is trying to make his favorite poems your favorite poems; but see that he is using these poems to illustrate how to interpret and engulf your own favorite poems. This book is Bloom at his most genial and wise, and at times his most personal.

This is a very good collection of poetry. It is not the collection I would choose were I to compile such a tome, but this is no surprise. The sense of poetry, what makes a good poem technically, emotionally, artistically is a very personal matter. What is presented here is a particular collection from one of the 'experts' of the day in the field of poetry, and an interesting survey it is.

Bloom freely admits to not being 'equal' with all the poets here in terms of their introductory material -- sometimes this is because of the breadth or unique character of their poetry, or sometimes (as in the case of Shakespeare, which is rather short given his overall relationship to the English language) because there is more general accessibility, either of the texts or of outside information readily available. Bloom has used modernised texts for the poetry for the most part, save where the original text is crucial for understanding and appreciating the poetry (as is the case with Chaucer) -- in which case there are helpful notes to aid in 'translation'.

Despite the title's proclamation of the poetry cycle being from Chaucer to Frost, in fact there are more than a dozen poets after Robert Frost included in the text --the poets are arranged chronologically, beginning with Chaucer and leading up to Hart Crane, who was born in 1899. Bloom did not include 'twentieth-century' poets -- in other words, any poet born in 1900 or later. Thus there are some notable figures missing at the end of the volume; there are no selections from Odgen Nash, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, or other notable contemporaries. There are also a few omissions from earlier times -- e.e. cummings, born in 1894, is not represented here (and yet John Brooks Wheelwright (who? you might ask) is), nor is Robert Graves. One might quibble here, and say that this book is a collection of 'some' of the Best Poems of the English Language, but hardly all. However, that criticism could likely be levelled against any volume daring the title 'Best Poems'.

Bloom has decided tastes, developed over a decades-long career in literary pursuits that have included poetry, prose, sacred literature, modern culture and more. His introductory essay (about 30 pages of the text) gives the reader little doubt where Bloom's tastes lie, and that is ultimately the reason for the selections in the remaining 950-odd pages. Bloom also pulls no punches in the commentary-biographies introducing the poets -- for example he states 'I confess a lifelong hostility to T.S. Eliot,' as the first sentence (in capital letters, no less) to the biographical introduction to Eliot; one wonders if the inclusion of the relatively unknown Wheelwright mentioned above has as much to do with his political affinities as to do with his literary merit.

Ultimately there are three strengths to this text -- first, it is a selection of some of the greatest poems in English, despite the absence of a few notables, including the absence of anything Old English or Anonymously written; second, Bloom's commentaries from lifelong experience and study make worthwhile reading whether or not one agrees with his tastes and interpretations; finally, it does trace in chronological order an interesting glimpse through well-known and sometimes overlooked poets and poems the overall development of English as a language of art, lyric expression and passion.

When I 'previewed' this before it came out I overestimated how much would be included. Luckily these sacrifices were made to make room for Bloom's several hundred pages of commentary on the individual poets, into which he incorporates full essays on Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams and others. Several of these, like many essays in his previous book "Genius", are reprinted largely intact from the introductions to his vast series of critical anthologies put out by Chelsea House. The Spenser essay, written over forty years ago, is particularly brilliant and stirring. Also rewarding is the volume's Introduction, where he tackles such topics as the types of metaphor and allusion and the nature of poetic value itself.
Though this isn't quite all of "the best" even in Dr. Bloom's view it has many of the English-language poetic touchstones down to about 1930. Longer works like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, The Prelude etc. are represented with brief but powerful excerpts. Bloom caves and gives a few pieces by esteemed poets he detests (Edgar Allen Poe and Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound) as well as some popular poems he's declared a bit overrated in the past (My Last Duchess, Crossing the Bar, [Emerson's] Days, Sunday Morning). A more substantive criticism: the selections from Donne, Swinburne and Yeats seem a little random. Were their very best works deemed too difficult for inclusion?

What's important, and priceless, is what *is* included: countless powerful songs, sonnets, elegies, satires and odes; selections you couldn't improve upon from Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Hart Crane and many others; and most of the great mini-epics: Epithalamion, Adonais, The Fall of Hyperion, Goblin Market, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Hunting of the Snark, The Auroras of Autumn.
As expected, the most pages are given to perennial Bloom favorites like Milton, Shelley, Whitman, Tennyson and Wallace Stevens... though surely nowhere near as many as he'd wanted to give. Signs of last-minute manuscript chopping appear throughout, actually: there's about a dozen mentions by name of "included" poems nowhere to be found! But while he arranges to have his proofreader shot we should all thank Bloom for his thoughtful distillation of one of the most important artistic traditions the world has known, poetry in English.
If only someone would offer him a whole Norton Anthology volume to fill with more of the same!

The book was just released today, so, no I haven't read all 1000 pages yet.

Bloom does not shy away from strong opinions, so many readers either love or hate him. Looking past the bluster, he is erudite and his prefaces to the poets and poems are usually interesting and often enlightening. He asserts that this book was a labor-of-love; his stated goal was to produce the anthology he has "always wanted to possess." Given this goal, it is hard to quibble with much of his selection, though much of it will already exist in your library if you are a serious reader of Poetry. If you are not, this book will serve as an excellent introduction to pre-Modern Poetry written in English.

Why Pre-Modern? Because Bloom limits himself to poets born before 1900. This seems like a silly restriction on a book that purports to be the "Best Poems of the English Language". The list of poets this excludes is extensive, but excludes Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott. Unfortunately, Dr. Bloom does not explain his choice to end with Hart Crane, but does add that if he didn't the book would include poets from Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. As it is, all poets are English or American - or Americans who wished they were English. This restriction also results in the book containing no black poets and only 11 women (with mainly short selections).

Bloom is steadfast in his rejection of "extrapoetic" reasons for including a poem: "Literary history is irrelevant... as are all considerations of political correctness or incorrectness. The best poems published by women before 1923 are here, chosen entirely on the basis of their aesthetic value." This may partially explain his choice of 1900, it helps avoid these considerations. It also avoids the editorial choices necessary to keep the book from becoming 2000 pages.

He also maintains that, "The best poetry in English, until this very day, is by Chaucer and Shakespeare..." Arguable, but illustrative of what to expect from this book: a selection of great, but traditional, English language Poetry.

So, the poems are [mostly] great and I enjoy Dr. Bloom's commentary, but do find fault with the arbitrary exclusion of many great poems produced in the 20th century, including works by minorities and poets from other English-speaking countries.

I've been excited about this book since Dr. Bloom first mentioned it in an interview (with National Public Radio I believe). His taste in poetry is famously excellent and ridiculously well-informed: if you're upset that Poem X by Poet Y isn't present don't think for an instant Bloom hasn't read it forty times and given it the consideration he feels it warrants. But his favorites are long since on the record in lists sprinkled among his many books, and to the extent they depart from consensus they run toward the cerebral, the visionary/spiritual, the head-breakingly complex. Here's what to expect:

Chaucer: selections from The Canterbury Tales, including The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Pardoner's Tale. Spenser: selections from The Faerie Queene such as the Garden of Adonis and Mutability episodes, Epithalamion, Prothalamion. Shakespeare: various sonnets and songs; if dramatic extracts are included, expect the heath scene from Lear, the country fair act from A Winter's Tale, the play-within-a-play and final scenes of Hamlet. Milton: Lycidas, l'Allegro, Il Penseroso, sonnets, perhaps Samson Agonistes, the early Satan episodes from Paradise Lost, some of the Eden business. Pope: The Rape of the Lock, selections from The Dunciad. Blake: Auguries of Innocence, The Mental Traveler, To the Accuser Who Is the God of This World, extracts from Jerusalem and from Milton. Wordsworth: the Immortality Ode, Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Ruined Cottage, Michael, extracts from the Prelude (possibly the whole two-book version of 1799). Coleridge: the Rime of course, Kubla Khan, Dejection: an Ode, Frost at Midnight. Byron: Stanzas to the Po, selections from Don Juan, The Vision of Judgement. Shelley: some or all of Prometheus Unbound, surely all of Adonais and the Triumph of Life, possibly The Witch of Atlas; many lyrics headed by Ode to the West Wind, The Two Spirits, Mont Blanc, To a Skylark, Ozymandias, the Jane poems. Keats: both Hyperion fragments, the Odes on an Urn, to a Nightingale, Psyche and Autumn; La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes, various sonnets. Tennyson: poems from Maud and In Memoriam (definitely sections 95 and 103), Ulysses, The Lotos-Eaters etc. Browning: Childe Roland, Andrea del Sarto, Abt Vogler, Caliban Upon Setebos; maybe some of The Pope from The Ring and the Book. Whitman: Song of Myself (earliest version), As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd. Dickinson: The Tint I Cannot Take Is Best among many others. Yeats: Dialogue of Self and Soul, Vacillation, Adam's Curse, The Tower, Meru, Man and the Echo, Cuchulain Comforted. Eliot: The Waste Land, Prufrock, La figlia che piange. Crane: maybe all of The Bridge and Voyages; The Broken Tower, Repose of Rivers. Stevens: he may be audacious and include all of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, and Auroras of Autumn; The Idea of Order at Key West, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Puella Parvula, The River of Rivers in Connecticut and many others will certainly be present. Frost: Directive, Design, The Oven Bird, The Wood-Pile, The Most of It, A Cabin in the Clearing. These are Bloom's favorites and the poets most of the volume will be devoted to, but expect sprinklings from John Donne, Andrew Marvell, William Collins, John Clare, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Bishop if she isn't considered post-Frost, and many others. The price of the volume suggests Dr. Bloom has about a thousand pages to fill.

This is one of those unfortunately common instances where I wish there were half-stars in the Amazon rating system, as this work is more than a "4" to me but less than perfection. I rationalize the "5" by observing some of the unfair and apparently arbitrary "1"s that Bloom's approach to literature is bound to stir up.

One expects that those politicizing literary approaches and idols that the aesthete Harold Bloom tears down to object to any of his works, let alone one so boldly titled "The Best Poems of the English Language". However, unlike most "Best Poems" collections Bloom's selection is broad if not always deep, and consequential if not reflectively conscientious. The poems Bloom includes in this collection are /good/, and Bloom carefully explains why they were picked, and why perhaps more popular or traditional works are ignored. There are a few surprises here, but I predict these are the poems we will return to 50 years in the future, when serious readers realize most extraneous influences on literary criticism and editorial choice are irrelevant.

I dump praise on Bloom because he is delightfully insightful and incisive. He does not pull punches, and has the experience of a lifetime of literary criticism and writings to back himself up. This is not to say that his critical style is neutral or wholly impartial; as another reviewer pointed out, Bloom may come off as a "bully" at times. But his selections

If you love poetry, and if you love the English language, Bloom's selection is for you. But if you're more concerned with Eurocentric hedgemony than aesthetics, and more sensitive to cultural egalitarianism than to effective rhetoric, you'll probably agree with the reviewers who didn't actually read this work, but rated it extremely low anyway.

I can't say I buy many anthologies of poetry; instead, I prefer to buy the collected works of poets I find interesting or about whom I am curious. This one, however, caught my eye. I have read other works by Bloom, including the WESTERN CANON, and I figured I'd see what he has to say about these poets.

The title should be taken tongue-in-cheek. Any selection of poetry is going to be highly subjective, especially when it is proclaimed to be THE BEST. Those criticizing the exclusion of certain poets are a bit off in their criticism; this is BLOOM'S selection of the best, and no other man's selection of the best poetry is going to be the same as yours, mine, or the dude who lives at the end of the street's.

You may ask, then: why should we care? The answer lies partly in Bloom's criticism, and partly because Bloom's erudition lends itself well to such anthologies.

By the first, I mean that his criticism is good. Not great; good. There are certainly sparks of illumination herein--I found the sections on Spenser, Wordsworth, and a few others particularly good--but in general it is pretty superficial, in the sense that his criticism does not delve very deep into any one poem or another (with the exception of maybe the FAERIE QUEENE, though no work of criticism can go deep enough into that!). Bloom instead prefers to skate along the surface of the poems, but, in so doing, he makes this a very readable and interesting volume, especially for the non-professional.

The second point, on his erudition, is valid because Bloom presents us with some very unknown and forgotten poets who are truly worth remembering. The standard greats are almost all there, but the real gems often lie in the unknowns.

If you are a professor, or somebody particularly well-read in poetry, it is only this last point that will be of value to you. For those of us who are neither (I'm relatively well-read in poetry, but by no means an expert!), Bloom's work is well worth picking up.

A book to buy and read for anyone interested at all in the highest arts of the written English language. Dr. Bloom, a person with a higher level of knowledge and pure intellect than almost all, has brought together many of the great poems of our civilization. While I did not understand all he said in his introductions, there is no doubt he is a treasure of our society.

I am not someone who normally reads poetry. This book gave me access to works by poets (many I had not even heard of) that I would never have read otherwise---which would have been my sad loss.

Hard to give a rating because there is some stellar poetry in this book, but much of the commentary is useless. It is fairly easy to present stellar poetry when you have the history of poetry to choose from. Bloom has some good insights, but is way too full of his own arrogant opinions for this reader. On the other hand you will discover some obscure poems in this anthology that you've never read before, and rediscover a few older ones. Overall, I'd say this book is a service to poetry, but yeesh, you really have to make room for Bloom. Easily the most slanted anthology I've ever read, which is really saying something, because they are all slanted one way or another.

Harold Bloom is arguably the greatest living literary critic, a worthy heir to his own great mentors Samuel Johnson, F.C. Bradley, M.H.Abrams and Northrop Frye. Bloom forced to slowdown from composition of his own works while recovering for twenty-months from a triple- bypass put together this anthology of what he regards to be as the greatest poems in the English language. The work it should be noted does not include twentieth century works in part because Bloom believes there are so many fine poets in the twentieth - century it would be almost impossible to do this. He also hoped to avoid the kind of battles he has long been familiar with in which the 'politically correct' issues enter. Bloom makes it clear that those kind of ethnic, gender,sexual orientation issues and other what he calls 'irrelevancies' have nothing to do with the selections he makes in this work. His criteria are in his own words, " The standards of judgment which matter to me,are cognitive achievement, aesthetic splendor, and wisdom: only those three."
So what he provides Chaucer to Hart Crane are by and large selections from the standard canon of English poetry. He also provides a thirty-page introduction on how to read poetry, biographical sketches, and commentary on the poems. Bloom is a tough but loving critic, for whom agon and agony go with his whole understanding of the poetry- making process. The whole business of succeeding poets seeing their predecessors as rivals who they first admire and then must misread to overcome and distinguish themselves from is at the heart of his vision of poetry. But Bloom is also an extremely broad- minded, generous and appreciative reader. His passion for poetry is felt in the commentary, and his life- long dedication sensed in his championing of the selections. It is fitting that the last poet included in the volume is Hart Crane (b. 1899) for it is with a volume of his 'White Bridges' that the then twelve - year old Harold Bloom discovered his love of poetry, and his desire to devote his life to the reading and writing of it. As a great and perhaps unequalled reader, perhaps in terms of his mastery of the whole text of poetic literature the all - time master Bloom transmits to us in love the works he , and it is fair to say most general readers of poetry, have most loved .