Customer Reviews

The Mentor Book of Major American Poets

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"The Mentor Book of Major American Poets," edited by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig, brings together generous selections from the work of 20 writers: Edward Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, and W.H. Auden. These authors span the 17th to 20th centuries (the youngest was born in 1907). Many styles, forms, and themes are contained within this rich anthology.

That having been said, I must note that the book has a copyright date of 1962, and it really shows its age. It's hard to imagine someone compiling an anthology of major american poets (to 1962) today and making the omissions that Williams and Honig did: Anne Bradstreet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others.

Despite its deficiencies, this is a wonderful collection that contains a wealth of memorable pieces. A few of my favorites: Taylor's rapturous "Stupendous Love!"; Emerson's "The Snowstorm," which celebrates the "frolic architecture of the snow"; Poe's masterwork "The Raven"; Whitman's ecstatic, all-embracing "Song of Myself"; a marvelous selection of Dickinson's quirky genius; Robinson's tragic "Richard Cory"; S. Crane's haunting short poems; Lindsay's lush, musical (and very politically incorrect!) "The Congo"; Cummings' amazing sonnet beginning "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm"; and much more.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in American poetry, but caution that, because of its dated nature, it needs to be supplemented.

This work contains samples of many outstanding American poets and also of the great American poets. In my own feeling the great American poets are few in number. Whitman, Dickinson , Wallace Stevens , Eliot ( if he is an American) and on the borderline Poe Frost and Cummings. This anthology which contains works only up until the early sixties does not thus include today's most well- known active poets. But in my feeling( and it is only that ) these poets do not come to the level of their great predecessors. And here I think Emerson's judgment is correct and the one poet who most embodies the spirit of America at least in its most expansive phase is Whitman.
This anthology though contains the work of many very good poets , and thus any real reader of it will certainly have a true idea and feeling of what American poetry is about.

It only had a few that I had heard of, or considered famous. It is a nice inexpensive paperback to have for your library.The Mentor Book of Major American Poets

What a lovely compilation of great works by American poets. It satisfied the reading requirements for my kids high school language arts course.

Other reviewers have noted that this an aging book. It's a fair criticism, but this is still a great collection of some of the best works of some of the most important American poets. It's nice and small and relatively cheap. I keep a copy of it on my nightstand and read from it almost daily.

This would have been an excellent survey of American poets thirty years ago. But now it's a little bit dated. First, it does not contain any American poets since then. Second, it seems to have been written before the revolution in recent decades which brought some previously ignored poets of high caliber, but not white male enough to fame. For instance, Langston Hughes is clearly one of America's major poets, who had been around for decades before this book was published, but it includes nothing about him. The work that is included is clearly excellent, but there are plenty of better anthologies available now.