Customer Reviews

The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry

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I've owned and loved this anthology for a decade. I'm especially fond of its choices in American nature poetry; it follows the transcendentalist line from Emerson and Thoreau and Dickinson through such Emersonian contemporaries as Louise Gluck and Charles Wright. This is also one of the few American poetry anthologies on the market that reaches back to pre-colonial times and moves right into the present. One of its interesting features is its representation of women's voices from the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the 20th century. There are also many African American poets. The book has obviously been through many printings, and over the years the editors have cleaned up copy-editing errors that appeared in the original edition. The introduction is fresh and appealing to students and readers of all levels. A great classroom book, although it's skimpy on the Beats and the West Coast school, and even the New York school (although the selection of poems by John Ashbery is particularly original).

This is a decent anthology and represents a fair sampling of the major American poets and poetry of our country's literary history. One of its major positives is that it strives hard to cover the span of our poetic history, from Bradstreet to the present day, and it manages to reflect both a nice cross-section of cultural history, as well as the major poetic movements. On the negative side, the book has some strange idiosyncratic features that will distract some readers -- particularly those using this as a textbook. For example, Emily Dickinson's poetry is published here in a conventional form, minus the stylistic dashes and capital letters that we associate with Dickinson's style. Early editors of Dickinson's poetry "cleaned up" these features in Dickinson's work, and it wasn't until the features were replaced some time later that readers became acquainted with Dickinson's work as it was actually written. Why Parini chose to revert to this presentation is inexplicable. Equally inexplicable is his decision to publish an earlier, inferior version of "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" instead of the version usually included. Likewise, while teaching William Stafford's poetry to a class, I was mortified to discover that the entire last paragraph of Stafford's "At the Bomb Testing Site" was not included in the poem! These are editing/copyediting lapses, but one wonders how on earth they made it through into the final copy. Teachers using this as a class text will also be mystified about the complete dearth of footnotes with poems (imagine students trying to read "The Waste Land" without footnotes), or the absence of biographical material about the writers. These are large matters, but one hopes future editions will rectify them. There aren't many decent single volume end-to-end anthologies of American poetry on the market, so this one serves a function. But someone needs to fix parts of it.

Although this is much less expensive than the Norton Anthologies, you can see where Norton spends the extra money. This is a very bare bones anthology with little in the way of critical superstructure (besides Parini's very good introduction.