John Hollander and Harold Bloom's wonderful anthology of poems follows the critic Northrop Frye's archetypally inflected theory of modes as set forth in Frye's seminal ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, a book I suspect is much less read than it used to be. Frye links literary themes and genres with seasons of the year; it seems intuitively right that Spring should be associated with courtship and travel, or Winter with elegies and farewells and storms. Bloom and Hollander do not mention Frye but hew happily to his
way of anatomizing human experience, an anatomy which beautifully fits the need of an anthology to articulate its contents. None of the poems they chose was recent enough to require permission; we have riches from poets like George Darley, John Davidson, Thomas Love Peacock, and many, many others. Keats's sonnet "Four seasons fill the measure of the year" is a moving spirit here, and Tennyson's stanzas from IN MEMORIAM "Ring out, wild bells" takes us "Beyond Winter." The anthology's title, of course, comes from the song in Shakespeare's TWELFTH NIGHT. A poetic feast hat I found very stimulating when, at thirteen orso - in the early Sixties - it was given to me as a gift by my wise mother.
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