- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: Dover Publications Inc. (21 Jan 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0486401588
- ISBN-13: 978-0486401584
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.3 x 0.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 180,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Rich treasury of verse from 19th and 20th centuries, selected for popularity and literary quality, includes Poe’s "The Raven," Whitman’s "I Hear America Singing," as well as poems by Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is the manifestation of the dream of former U.S. Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky when he said, "Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is." Brodsky believed that poetry books should be distributed free of charge in many places, such as supermarkets and factories. He also had the idea that an anthology of poetry should be, "found in every hotel room in the land." Brodsky went on to create the American Poetry & Literacy Project in 1993, and is the compiler of this book.
This little anthology covers more than 350 years of American poetry. It includes poets who were famous in their own time such as Edgar Allen Poe, and poets whose talents weren't realized until after their death, such as Emily Dickinson. It displays American patriotism in poems such as Walt Whitman's, "I Hear America Singing", and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride." Poems such as, "Dream Deferred (Harlem)" by Langston Hughes, and "Incident" by Countee Cullen, explore themes of racial prejudice and African American culture. War, loneliness, nature, children, all the many issues and emotions we as human beings find ourselves dealing with today, are all included in this small, yet well-comprised anthology.
Many of my personal favorites include poems about poetry itself. These poets and writers give serious, and not so serious, contemplation to the art of writing. On page 65, the teacher and library assistant Marianne Moore begins her poem, "Poetry" with these lines:
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Moore, known for her complex poems was known as the "poet's poet," and was the editor of the literary magazine The Dial, according the book's biography about her.
Pulitzer prize winner Archibald Macleish's poem, "Ars Poetica" gives his view of what a poem should be on page 72:
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
The books biography on Macleish says that he was an editor for Fortune magazine, Librarian of Congress, and Assistant Secretary of State.
According to Andrew Carroll, the Executive Director of The American Poetry and Literacy Project, Joseph Brodsky never saw the final version of this book, "101 Great American Poems" before his death. He leaves us however, with Brodsky's inspiring words in his Introduction to the book:
"Books find their readers, and if not, well let them lie around, absorb dust, rot and disintegrate. There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap. I was such a child, for what it's worth..."
For us, Brodsky's own poetry and the legacy he left behind in The American Poetry and Literacy Project, continues to be worth a fortune.
~Brian Douthit
author of "Perfectly Said: when words become art"
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
23 reviews
59 of 63 people found the following review helpful
Table of Contents:
24 July 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Anne Bradstreet
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Phillis Wheatley
"From To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth"
William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concord Hymn
The Snow-storm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Arrow and the Song
The Builders
The Children's Hour
The Day is Done
Paul Revere's Ride
Edgar Allan Poe
Alone
Annabel Lee
The Conqueror Worm
The Raven
To Helen
Abraham Lincoln
My Childhood's Home I see Again
"Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr."
Old Ironsides
Herman Melville
Misgivings
Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing
I Sit and Look Out
Miracles
A Noiseless Patient Spider
O Captain! My Captain!
From Song of Myself
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Frances E. W. Harper
Bury Me in a Free Land
Songs for the People
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death'
Death sets a thing significant'
Hope is the thing with feathers'
I died for beauty'
If I can stop one heart from breaking'
I'm nobody! Who are you?'
My life closed twice before its close'
Success is counted sweetest'
There is no frigate like a book'
This is my letter to the world'
Emma Lazarus
The New Colossus
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Solitude
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
Casey at the Bat
Edgar Lee Masters
The Unknown
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Flood's Party
Richard Cory
Stephen Crane
I saw a man pursuing the horizon'
War Is Kind
James Weldon Johnson
Sence You Went Away
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Lesson
Sympathy
We Wear the Mask
Gertrude Stein
Susie Asado
Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
After Apple-Picking
Birches
Design
Fire and Ice
Mending Wall
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Road Not Taken
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Carl Sandburg
Chicago
"I am the People, the Mob"
Vachel Lindsay
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
Euclid
The Leaden-Eyed
Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Gubbinal
The Reader
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
William Carlos Williams
The Great Figure
The Red Wheelbarrow
This is Just To Say
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Sara Teasdale
Peace
Ezra Pound
In a station of the Metro
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
Robinson Jeffers
"Shine, Perishing Republic"
"Shine, Republic"
Marianne Moore
Poetry
T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Claude McKay
After the Winter
If We Must Die
The Tropics in New York
Edna St. Vincent Millay
First Fig
Recuerdo
Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
The End of the World
E.E. Cummings
since feeling is first
Jean Toomer
Her Lips Are Copper Wire
Reapers
Langston Hughes
Dream Deferred (Harlem)
"I, Too"
Little Old Letter
Mother to Son
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Still Here
Countee Cullen
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Incident
W.H. Auden
The Unknown Citizen
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Phillis Wheatley
"From To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth"
William Cullen Bryant
Thanatopsis
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concord Hymn
The Snow-storm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Arrow and the Song
The Builders
The Children's Hour
The Day is Done
Paul Revere's Ride
Edgar Allan Poe
Alone
Annabel Lee
The Conqueror Worm
The Raven
To Helen
Abraham Lincoln
My Childhood's Home I see Again
"Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr."
Old Ironsides
Herman Melville
Misgivings
Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing
I Sit and Look Out
Miracles
A Noiseless Patient Spider
O Captain! My Captain!
From Song of Myself
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Frances E. W. Harper
Bury Me in a Free Land
Songs for the People
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death'
Death sets a thing significant'
Hope is the thing with feathers'
I died for beauty'
If I can stop one heart from breaking'
I'm nobody! Who are you?'
My life closed twice before its close'
Success is counted sweetest'
There is no frigate like a book'
This is my letter to the world'
Emma Lazarus
The New Colossus
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Solitude
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
Casey at the Bat
Edgar Lee Masters
The Unknown
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Flood's Party
Richard Cory
Stephen Crane
I saw a man pursuing the horizon'
War Is Kind
James Weldon Johnson
Sence You Went Away
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Lesson
Sympathy
We Wear the Mask
Gertrude Stein
Susie Asado
Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
After Apple-Picking
Birches
Design
Fire and Ice
Mending Wall
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Road Not Taken
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Carl Sandburg
Chicago
"I am the People, the Mob"
Vachel Lindsay
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
Euclid
The Leaden-Eyed
Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Gubbinal
The Reader
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
William Carlos Williams
The Great Figure
The Red Wheelbarrow
This is Just To Say
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Sara Teasdale
Peace
Ezra Pound
In a station of the Metro
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
Robinson Jeffers
"Shine, Perishing Republic"
"Shine, Republic"
Marianne Moore
Poetry
T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Claude McKay
After the Winter
If We Must Die
The Tropics in New York
Edna St. Vincent Millay
First Fig
Recuerdo
Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
The End of the World
E.E. Cummings
since feeling is first
Jean Toomer
Her Lips Are Copper Wire
Reapers
Langston Hughes
Dream Deferred (Harlem)
"I, Too"
Little Old Letter
Mother to Son
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Still Here
Countee Cullen
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Incident
W.H. Auden
The Unknown Citizen
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
The American school anthology
2 May 2005
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful collection of American poetry classics. It contains most of the poems that have been taught through the years in American schools as the ' classics ' of American Literature. It does not really touch the American poetry of the past fifty years.
Most of its poems are the shorter poems of great poetic masters , for instance for Wallace Stevens, " Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird' and the 'Emperor of Ice- Cream' but not the 'Idea of Order at Key West' for Eliot, " Prufrock" but not the "Wasteland " or the "Quartets".
A wonderful collection most highly recommended.
Most of its poems are the shorter poems of great poetic masters , for instance for Wallace Stevens, " Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird' and the 'Emperor of Ice- Cream' but not the 'Idea of Order at Key West' for Eliot, " Prufrock" but not the "Wasteland " or the "Quartets".
A wonderful collection most highly recommended.
24 of 31 people found the following review helpful
An Overview of Already-Familiar American Poems
20 Aug 2001
Format:Paperback
The project undertaken is much larger than this small book can handle. It includes many of the old classic poems from which Americans know a line or two, so it is handy if you are studying trivia or if it just really, really bugs you when you can't remember what something is from. I guess that's my main use for the book. Much of it will seem rehashed if you are interested in poetry and looking for something new.
Perhaps you will enjoy this book more if you are new to poetry; my advice is to choose a poem you like, then read more by that author. On the other hand, for a dollar you can hardly go wrong adding this book to another order. You might buy a couple and hand them around just to raise awareness of poetry, which isn't read in schools as it was a hundred years ago.
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