The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine [Hardcover]

Joseph Parisi (Editor), Stephen Young (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 2002

“The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,” wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems,” Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America’s most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades—an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents—along with several lesser known—in all their variety: William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry “an American institution.” The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the above collection wisely confines itself to the first 50 of Poetry's ninety years, this anthology tries to take in the whole sweep of the magazine's existence, and ends up playing down its most important early years at the expense of its much less illustrious recent ones. Of the 487 pages of verse here, 94 are devoted to the period 1912-1936, or the term of Harriet Monroe's founding editorship. Readers looking for the entire set of Stevens "Pecksniffiana" poems will find some, but not all of them. T.S. Eliot's print debut, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is here, but Pound's Cantos are not (though "In a Station of the Metro" is). These authors are heavily anthologized though, and what proves most interesting are the years between Moeroe and current editor Joseph Parisi's tenures, particularly the '60s editorship of Henry Rago: Ashbery, Baraka (then Jones), Betjeman, Creeley, Hollander, Lowell, Plath, Rich, Snyder, can be found together, and one suspects the work printed during the period went even further out than represented here. Parisi's introduction includes a short bio of Harriet Monroe (calling her "the aging entrepreneur" as she starts the magazine at 51) and points to a perceived lack of "authentic avant-gardes" as a reason for the magazine's recent reactionary emphasis on traditional verse-craft. Nearly 40% of the poems here come from Parisi's watch, and some are excellent. But they fail to represent the explosive range and variety of poetry in English from the last quarter century.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Poetry is marking its ninetieth anniversary with the release of Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters (see p.378), and this comprehensive and thrilling anthology, a veritable history of twentieth-century poetry in English. As Poetry's current editor-in-chief Parisi observes in his vibrant introduction, the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, established an "open door" policy that netted the often financially imperiled and controversial but always vital magazine such revolutionary and lasting works as T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock" and the highly unorthodox poems of then obscure Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. In recounting the magazine's extraordinary history of aesthetic valor and improvised survival tactics, Parisi doesn't claim that all 29,000-plus poems by 4,725 authors published in 1,080 issues of Poetry were memorable, but he and coeditor Young still had to make hundreds of tough decisions to arrive at the more than 600 sterling poems collected here, poems by an array of poets past and living that include W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Lisel Mueller, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Susan Hahn, that cover a grand spectrum of emotions, outlooks, and literary creativity. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee; First Edition edition (September 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566634687
• ISBN-13: 978-1566634687
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,028,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptionally well-rounded treatise, January 11, 2003

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine (Hardcover)

The Poetry Anthology 1912-2002 gathers ninety years of Poetry Magazine, a publication founded in 1912 which published some of the most well-known poets of American history. This impressive and recommended anthology provides a decade-by-decade approach, juxtaposing such major talents as Yeats, Teasdale and Millay with Hughes, Crane and Cummings. An exceptionally well-rounded treatise emerges as a result.