Customer Reviews

101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Anne Bradstreet
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Phillis Wheatley
"From To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth"
William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concord Hymn
The Snow-storm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Arrow and the Song
The Builders
The Children's Hour
The Day is Done
Paul Revere's Ride
Edgar Allan Poe
Alone
Annabel Lee
The Conqueror Worm
The Raven
To Helen
Abraham Lincoln
My Childhood's Home I see Again
"Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr."
Old Ironsides
Herman Melville
Misgivings
Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing
I Sit and Look Out
Miracles
A Noiseless Patient Spider
O Captain! My Captain!
From Song of Myself
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Frances E. W. Harper
Bury Me in a Free Land
Songs for the People
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death'
Death sets a thing significant'
Hope is the thing with feathers'
I died for beauty'
If I can stop one heart from breaking'
I'm nobody! Who are you?'
My life closed twice before its close'
Success is counted sweetest'
There is no frigate like a book'
This is my letter to the world'
Emma Lazarus
The New Colossus
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Solitude
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
Casey at the Bat
Edgar Lee Masters
The Unknown
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Flood's Party
Richard Cory
Stephen Crane
I saw a man pursuing the horizon'
War Is Kind
James Weldon Johnson
Sence You Went Away
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Lesson
Sympathy
We Wear the Mask
Gertrude Stein
Susie Asado
Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
After Apple-Picking
Birches
Design
Fire and Ice
Mending Wall
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Road Not Taken
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Carl Sandburg
Chicago
"I am the People, the Mob"
Vachel Lindsay
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
Euclid
The Leaden-Eyed
Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Gubbinal
The Reader
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
William Carlos Williams
The Great Figure
The Red Wheelbarrow
This is Just To Say
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Sara Teasdale
Peace
Ezra Pound
In a station of the Metro
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
Robinson Jeffers
"Shine, Perishing Republic"
"Shine, Republic"
Marianne Moore
Poetry
T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Claude McKay
After the Winter
If We Must Die
The Tropics in New York
Edna St. Vincent Millay
First Fig
Recuerdo
Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
The End of the World
E.E. Cummings
since feeling is first
Jean Toomer
Her Lips Are Copper Wire
Reapers
Langston Hughes
Dream Deferred (Harlem)
"I, Too"
Little Old Letter
Mother to Son
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Still Here
Countee Cullen
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Incident
W.H. Auden
The Unknown Citizen

This is a wonderful collection of American poetry classics. It contains most of the poems that have been taught through the years in American schools as the ' classics ' of American Literature. It does not really touch the American poetry of the past fifty years.
Most of its poems are the shorter poems of great poetic masters , for instance for Wallace Stevens, " Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird' and the 'Emperor of Ice- Cream' but not the 'Idea of Order at Key West' for Eliot, " Prufrock" but not the "Wasteland " or the "Quartets".
A wonderful collection most highly recommended.

The project undertaken is much larger than this small book can handle. It includes many of the old classic poems from which Americans know a line or two, so it is handy if you are studying trivia or if it just really, really bugs you when you can't remember what something is from. I guess that's my main use for the book. Much of it will seem rehashed if you are interested in poetry and looking for something new.

Perhaps you will enjoy this book more if you are new to poetry; my advice is to choose a poem you like, then read more by that author. On the other hand, for a dollar you can hardly go wrong adding this book to another order. You might buy a couple and hand them around just to raise awareness of poetry, which isn't read in schools as it was a hundred years ago.

The purpose of this book is to provide an affordable compilation of good, popular American poetry for the enjoyment of students and the general public.

When considering whether to buy this book, it is important to note that the title is *not* _The 101 Greatest American Poems_. It is more modestly, _101 Great American Poems_, which were selected for a variety of reasons.

These are mostly old favorites, which is to be expected because the back of the book reads, "selected for both popularity and literary quality..."

The publishers appear to have tried to include poems from blacks and other people that historically had a hard time publishing. There are 35 poets, ten of whom are women, and four are black. Only William Carlos Williams represents anyone of Hispanic descent. Historically, in terms of poems that have been appreciated and loved by the majority of Americans, this is a fair representation. On the other hand, we know now that many other great poems were not published or publicized because of the color of the author's skin, or her sex. Therefore, depending on what you are looking for, you may or may not be happy with this compilation. Our family is happy with it as an introduction to well-known poems but we'll probably supplement with less-known poetry using other collections.

The poems are arranged in chronological order. If you are looking to introduce a child to poetry, they are generally of quite manageable length. There are several which are appropriate for recitation, reading at the dinner table, or reading at bedtime.

Many of the poems deal with death so it might not be the ideal introduction for the very sensitive child who is reading on her own.

I was not surprised by the content. It had all of the classics I was hoping for and more. Dover Thrift Edition is a wonderful way to go when you want to read more than the junk being put out today. Plus, the price is definitely right!! They have all the classic novels and poems that you could ever want or need! I do recommend this book specifically, it is great especially for someone new to the world of poetry.

This book is quite wonderful. It includes some of my all time favorite American Poets. I recommend it to anyone who likes poetry.

Also Recommended: Quotes, Poems, and Words That Flow by Kevin Grommersch

My husband wanted a book to use to begin introducing our daughter to poetry. As she's only 5, I didn't want to spend a lot of money even knowing if she would like it or not; I was more than pleased with the selection of poems offered, not to mention the price! Highly recommend.

I sent this book o my son and he love it reading it every day

I bought this book to introduce my students to American poetry from different time periods, and in that respect the book did what I needed it to do. Even so, I would have liked to see more contemporary poetry and a wider variety of styles. I know that any compilation like this is going to focus on traditional canon poetry, but I would have like to see a little more variation. Even so, it has a lot of great stuff in it and I recommend it for anyone looking for an inexpensive reference or collection.

I really enjoyed this alot. I felt I was transported into a world of great poems. There really wasn't a bad piece here. Indulge and buy this book.