Customer Reviews

Premier Book of Major Poets: An Anthology

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This is a very fine book of poetry. It contains many poems (split into subjects) by authors such as William Shakesphere, William Blake, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. If you enjoy reading poetry, you must by this book.

If you have ever wanted to own a compact collection of well-known poetry, this is the book to get! Many of the poems contained in this anthology are "standards"; the kind you find in literature textbooks, as well as those that are popular for memorization. There were also many I hadn't previously seen before. The thematic arrangement of the poems (poems about nature, people, and so on) separates different types of subject matter. The authors range from different eras (traditional poems, 19th century, to more recent times) and are of different poetic styles (some rhyming, some non-rhyming). The accessible nature of this book could allow it to be easily enjoyed by those who like poetry as well as those who haven't read much poetry.
The most major problem that I noticed with this book is that there are no poems from Oscar Wilde! What is a poetry anthology without at least one of his poems? Perhaps he is better known for writing plays (such as "The Importance of Being Earnest") and his one novel ("The Picture of Dorian Gray"), but his first work published in 1881 was a collection of poems. Not even his well-known "Ballad of Reading Gaol" (a later work; 1898) is included here.
Aside from this, I think it is a decent collection of poetry. I would recommend this to any high school students needing to read poetry for English or for selecting poems suitable for memorization.

During the many years I was a college professor of creative writing I used Anita Dore's anthology as a text. It is the one I still always turn to first when looking for a particular poem or for poems within a particular category (Nature, Creatures, Generation, etc.). When my copy literally fell apart, I was delighted to discover this new edition--basically unchanged, much to my relief!
--Carol F. Peck

Did anyone else notice all the extraneous reprinted pages of poetry at the end. In my edition, much of the Human Condition and Meaning of Life sections is repeated in reverse as well as onward order. The Glossary of poetic terms recurs along with a couple pages of author profiles. A great book, but what happened there at the end?!