Customer Reviews

The Top 500 Poems

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I like to buy this book as a present for people I like because I know I can hardly go wrong. (Forget the Godiva chocolates or the Heitz Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon: this will last!) Whether one is a wannabe rap master from Watts or a distinguished professor of English lit at the Sorbonne, there will be something here to please, I promise.

It should be emphasized that this is a collection of strictly English language poetry, which means, for example, that none of verses from Edward Fitzgerald's very English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam appears even though some of those verses are among the most popular and the most anthologized. It should also be noted that this is not a contemporary collection (copyright date, 1992) so there's no Gary Soto or Rita Dove or Louise Glück or even Margaret Atwood. It should also be pointed out that if you're looking into Keats's, e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale," for the first time, perhaps this is not the best place to find it since none of the poems are explicated. Editor William Harmon does give a brief note as an introduction to each poet, and concludes each poem with a brief comment.

The collection is popular of course and spans English poetry from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath but there's nary a ditty to be found. Although T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is here (hurrah!), there's nothing from his Book of Practical Cats (alas) and no Kipling's "If"! This is really high class stuff, quite simply the best. All the giants are here, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, Andrew Marvell, Frost, Yeats, Dickinson, etc., etc. Some moderns are represented, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, etc., although notably absent is Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Harmon's method of selection was to peruse anthologies and include those poems most often making an appearance. Of course it's obvious that some editorial decisions were made. I have little doubt that Kipling's "If" really is among the 500 most anthologized poems, although it doesn't appear here, and ditto for Robert Service and his very popular, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But perhaps this is just as well since those poems really are easily found elsewhere. The admirable point that Harmon is making with this collection is that one can include in a popular book the great poems of the language even though some of them are "difficult." In this category there's Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and others. Harmon also does not shy away from poems often left out of anthologies because of length. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is here in toto and so is Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Of course not everything is here, and one can indeed find fault. There can be differences of opinion, and it is very true that a collection based on other collections will indeed leave out some great poems and poets. Amy Lowell does not appear, meaning that her "Patterns," one of the great poems in the language, is not here. John Crowe Ransom's "Blue Girls," one of my personal favorites is apparently not much anthologized; at least it doesn't appear here. And I was surprised at only two selections from e. e. cummings (and neither one was "plato told him"!).

But this is to nitpick. This is a great collection and more than that it is beautifully edited. The poems are presented chronologically, beginning with the anonymous "Cuckoo Song." There is an index of titles and first lines, which is the way it should be. (Some editors fail to include titles in such an index, but we think of both when trying to recall...) There is an index of poets, and finally the 500 poems are listed in order of popularity. William Blake's "The Tiger" is number one. (For some reason Harmon modernized Blake's spelling of "Tyger.") Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is the most anthologized poem by an American. Even Harmon's short introduction, which he titles "This is it!" is well worth reading. Therein one discovers that Shakespeare is the poet with the most poems included (29), followed by Donne (19), Blake (18) and Dickinson and Yeats (14).

Here (as a public service) I was going to explicate Donne's charming but tricky (and a wee bit sexist) "Go and Catch a Falling Star" (an apt choice because Harmon has "I" instead of the poet's intended "If," a typo at the beginning of line nine) but I'm running out of space, and besides poets hate to be explicated.

Yesterday, I needed to find a copy of Robert Frost's `Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' in order to make sure I was correctly quoting the last verse.

There are a number of books I could have turned to, but this particular book was my first choice. I bought this anthology, about 15 years ago, because I was intrigued to know which poems would be included and on what basis. In a delightful editorial note, William Harmon writes that these are the most anthologized poems in English.

The time span (based on the birth of the poets) is from 1250-1350 (approx) for the anonymous author of the `Cuckoo Song' to 1932 for Sylvia Plath, author of `'Daddy'.

A favourite poem? That will depend entirely on mood and audience. While the Emily Bronte poem included `Remembrance' is not my favourite of hers (my heart has long since been given to `No Coward Soul is Mine') it is another of her passionate, stirring poems. Yesterday, I enjoyed `Ars Poetica' by Archibald MacLeish which starts:
`A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit.'

But the poem I was searching for in the beginning ends this way:
`The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.'

I recommend this anthology highly to those who would like one collection of significant English poems. May you find, as I did, both old acquaintances and new friends within its pages.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

To begin, it's important to realize that "The Top 500 Poems" was compiled according to popularity in reproduction, not necessarily in terms of quality. It's also faced with the daunting task of representing English poetry from about 1300 or so until the 1900s. Therefore, it unavoidably has a couple of poems included that seem out of place. For instance, I didn't really need to have "The Purple Cow" or "Paul Revere's Ride" compiled for me, and I wouldn't have included a translated version of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. I sincerely doubt if any reader of the book has found all the poems included to his or her liking.

However, the overwhelming quality of the bulk of the book more than makes up for the weak patches. "The Top 500 Poems" is well organized chronologically, giving the reader a definite sense of progression through history. The introductory paragraphs to each author are informative and concise, and the commentary after each poem is brief but illuminating. Most important, of course, are the poems themselves, which at their best glow with the energy of the greatest literature. Personal favorites included here are: "Western Wind," "They Flee From Me," "That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold," "The Sun Rising," "To Penshurst," "The Collar," "To His Coy Mistress," "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "Holy Thursday," "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "Kubla Khan," "Ozymandias," "Ode On a Grecian Urn," "Ulysses," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "God's Grandeur," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Fern Hill," "Church Going," and "Daddy," to name a few. Many, many more poems equally wonderful are included along with these.

So, unless you're absolutely incapable of ceding a dozen slots in the top 500 list to inferior works, this is an incredibly cheap way to acquire a huge mass of wonderful poems. Legitimate greviances against twenty poems or so fall by the wayside next to four hundred and eighty works of genius.

As the review title indicates, this is a great gift idea for someone who is a nonpoet or does not teach english. True enthusiasts who write their own poetry or actually teach it would probably desire more depth than can be accomplished in a summary compilation of the greatest poetry.

Everyone has their idea of who the greatest poets were/are, and this book is as good of a cursory review of the greatest poets and poetry that can be put together. As a result this book has 3 drawbacks for the true enthusiast. 1) as has been noted by other reviewers, it only encompasses the English poets 2) this is someone elses' decisions on the "best" poetry and may leave out your particular favorite poem(s) (3) no depth to some poets but gives ample space to others, for example - Shakespeare 29 poems, Walt Whitman 5 poems, Edgar Allen Poe 6, Robert Frost 11, Emily Bronte 1, Geoffrey Chaucer 1.

Given the above listed shortcomings that would apply to any attempt to aggregate the "best" poetry, this book does an admirable job. As such, it makes a great gift for your favorite aunt or a bedside companion for yourself. Just realize that if you are a Frost fanatic, you will have to seek something more comprehensive for your favorite poet. Enjoy!

This book is not intended to be a compilation of the greatest poetry in English - although many of the greatest are included. Harmon has a reverence for poetry which shows in both his commentary and also his choice to simply include poems which were most anthologized elsewhere without imposing his own prejudices on the reader. He freely admits as much in the introduction when he calls the nineteenth century the golden age of poetry and believes the twentieth century poets inferior (don't take offense, contemporary lit fans - he believes the best work of the twentieth century is in prose and blames the media for underexposing poetry in general). If Top 500 had been entirely up to Harmon's judgment, it would contain little besides Lord Byron and his friends. I think it is very important to understand that this is not an individual's opinion on the language's finest poetry, but Poetry's Greatest Hits. If a reader can claim a nodding aquaintance with every poem in this book, they have mastered a very important section of cultural literacy.

By providing 750 years of poetry with commentary in chronological form, the reader watches the evolution of short verse in time-lapse photography. Anonymous ballads preserved by laundresses of old give way over the centuries to tightly structured meditations on passion, to the contemporary picking and choosing among forms or leaving them out entirely. After reading Edmund Spenser's gorgeous Prothalamion, published in 1596, Harmon tells us that T.S. Eliot's Waste Land borrows a line from it. John Donne borrows a line from Christopher Marlowe. We are asked to forgive the overt moralizing of "schoolroom poets" such as Holmes, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow in view of the demands of their early nineteenth century audience and appreciate their fine aesthetic qualities instead. The final two poems are Allen Ginsberg's Supermarket in California and Sylvia Plath's Daddy together reflect the spirit and future of modern poetry. Ginsberg's structure is determined by the words he chooses, and although there is no discernible form the lines have a pulse all their own, just as powerful as Shakespeare's perfect rhymes. Plath's verse is Dickensian in her commitment to the sounds she wants to make, sometimes using nonsense words to maintain the structure.

This book is a wonderful springboard for a person who likes poetry and wants to gain a broader knowledge of what kinds of things have been written. From this volume, the reader can decide to learn more about a poet or group of poets referenced only briefly here.

As others have said, this book gets your feet wet: it could help along a developing interest in poetry. (As opposed to encouraging the consumer to rest on her laurels with a self-satisfied air.) All the same, call me a stickler, but there are some really unconscionably bad typos in the reprinting of some of the poems--which is especially ironic given the rather irritatingly triumphalist ("the top"??) status accorded to these poems. Some of these are just sloppy. Still, to cite the most egregious example of this I could find: Roethke's "In a Dark Time" is printed with its last two stanzas missing--wtf?

This is the absolute best poetry book ever compiled! I love this book. I used to own a paperback copy of it many years ago and it was lost during a move. I was so upset about it. At that time I did not know about Amazon. So I went years without it :o( Then, for an anniversary gift, my husband bought this book for me from Amazon!. I was so happy that I could have cried! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK!!! IT IS WELL WORTH THE PRICE!

Litha

If you're looking for a book to study with, you probably shouldn't go for this one--as other reviewers have pointed out, it doesn't have footnotes or numbered lines. On the other hand, footnotes and numbered lines can be distracting or off-putting--a book that encourages that sort of analysis reminds me of musty classrooms and teachers who use poetry as a punishment. The lack of standard notation makes it possible to look at a poem and decide for yourself how to pick it apart; Harmon's conversational commentary makes each poem feel more deeply personal than it would in a standard compilation. Its incompleteness, but the inclusion of so many interesting tidbits encourages readers to find out more. I sincerely doubt you'd find notes of so much variety in any other compilation--info on a poet's life, a drug problem, a poem's popularity, Harmon's own thoughts, a few interesting words. It's a perfect place to begin. What makes poetry interesting is found here.

This compilation is wonderful. The poems range from some early anonymous rhymes and songs to interesting selections from the great poets of the English language in the 18th and 19th century to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Given that this list of "Top 500" was based on how often they were included in other anthologies I had expected a "greatest hits" type of collection. But these choices seemed interesting and idiosyncratic enough to make the book wothwhile.

There are two ways of reading "The Top 500 Poems." You can either read fast skipping over unfamiliar poems to find your favorites or read each poem and spend a great deal of time discovering new poems. I found that while reading I was unfamiliar with about 99% of the poems. I thought that in a book of famous poems I'd know many more than I did. Some of my favorites include:

Fog by Carl Sandburgh
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
Death Be Not Proud by John Donne
Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes by Ben Jonson
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
Jenny Kissed Me by Leigh Hunt
She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron
Ozymondias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Some of the poets are better represented than others. Like there are quite a few poems by Emily Dickinson. I did find however that even if you like a poem by a favorite poet that doesn't guarantee you will like all the other poems they have written as well. In fact some poems stand out so boldly they are like a magical poem compared to the others written. Like it is rare to find poems with such a lovely rhythm as "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear.

So depending on how much poetry you've read in your life this book may be charming or overwhelming. I'd suggest reading it selectively the first time so you can enjoy all the familiar poems and then maybe reading it again to introduce yourself to classics you may not have read yet.

~The Rebecca Review