100 Best-Loved Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
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Book Summary Information
Brand: Dover PublicationsEditor: Philip Smith
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-10-04
ISBN: 0486285537
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Dover Publications
Book Reviews of 100 Best-Loved Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
Book Review: Poetic Journey through Time
Summary: 4 Stars
"The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then move on."
~Fog, Carl Sandburg
100 Best-Loved Poems presents poems from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century. The poets are all familiar, but the poems are more varied and quite a few are poems I'd never read before. In a compilation like this, you'd imagine to find quite a few familiar favorites from high school or college and those did appear throughout.
There is comfort in reading poems we tried to understand in school, but didn't have the emotional maturity to fully digest. Now upon reflection, how could we have truly understood "To His Coy Mistress" at 16, a poem born of mature desire. Now nearing forty, I feel I can linger in these poems enjoying every nuance.
This classic collection includes brief introductions to each poet and includes some information on poetic forms. In the section of Ballads, you can hear the singsong rhymes as you read so the first poem was a good choice.
The poets include: Lord Randal, Sir Patrick Spens, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Edmund Waller, John Milton, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Gray, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Cullen Bryant, John Keats Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.
While the poems are not overly culturally diverse and seem to focus on English and American poets, there is a wonderful early translation for "The River-Merchant's Wife: A letter." It was fun to find "The Tyger" by William Blake and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" makes a little more sense to me now. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" makes more sense when you can see a picture. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a reminder of time's destructive powers and William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" speaks of the human condition and the way we connect with nature. William Butler Yeats has a different take on age in "When You Are Old." He speaks more of appreciation than destruction.
"For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
~I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
The selections by Emily Dickinson are playful and they made me want to read more of her poems. There are quite a few life lesson poems that are profound in content, like "If-" by Rudyard Kipling, where he speaks of what it takes to me a man. Robert Frost also presents intriguing notions and life choices in his "The Road Not Taken."
This collection offers recollections of poetry you may remember and introduces quite a few poems that are less familiar. John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV was new to me, although I had read Holy Sonnet X..."Death be not proud..."As far as romance goes, Ben Johnson's "To Celia" stands out as does Robert Burns' "A Red, Red Rose."
100 Best-Loved Poems is a lovely classic collection and it is nice to have all these poems in one book for future contemplation. I will have to agree with everyone else who made comment as to the lack of cultural variety. For this, you may want to seek out poetry collections by Sam Hamill. For me, this was an inexpensive way to expand my poetry knowledge and to remember some of the poems I learned in high school and college.
"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."
~Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost
~The Rebecca Review
Summary of 100 Best-Loved Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
Popular, well-known poetry: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" "Death, be not proud," "The Raven," "The Road Not Taken," plus works by Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Browning, Keats, Kipling, Sandburg, Pound, Auden, Thomas, and many others.
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