coldcojones's review

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informative reflective slow-paced

2.75

artemitch's review

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4.0

I think it's a pretty good survey of English poetry. All the big names are in here, including Shelley, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Poe, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Plath, etc. This collection spans several centuries, from around 1450 (first poem listed) to 2000 (the last poem listed; I have the third edition).

I highlighted lines that stuck out to me as I read, and then titles of poems that I particularly enjoyed. It doesn't surprise me that I liked the free-verse, confessional and sometimes rambling poems of the latter centuries as opposed to the strict and formalized ones of the former. I've discovered some poets that I'd like to get into.

Poems I liked:
Edmund Waller - "Song"
Alexander Pope - "Ode on Solitude"
Christopher Smart - from "Jubilate Agno"
William Wordsworth - "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"; "Lines (Tintern Abbey)"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "Work Without Hope"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - "The Cross of Snow"
Matthew Arnold - "Dover Beach"
Thomas Hardy - "Neutral Tones"
A. E. Hausman - "Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall" & " 'Terence, This is Stupid Stuff . . .' "
Edwin Arlington Robinson - "The Mill"
Stephen Crane - "The Black Riders"
Robert Frost - "In Need of Being Versed in Country Things" & "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Wallace Stevens - "Snow Man"
William Carlos Williams - "The Last Words of My English Grandmother"
Robinson Jeffers - "The Purse-Seine"
Stanley Kunitz - "Halley's Comet"
W. H. Auden - "Musee de Beaux Arts"
Elizabeth Bishop - "The Fish"
May Sarton - "A Guest"
Richard Wilbur - "The Writer" & "Year's End"
W. S. Merwin - "For the Anniversary of My Death"
James Wright - "A Blessing" & "Saint Judas"
Anne Sexton - "The Truth the Dead Know"
Adrienne Rich - "Diving into the Wreck" & "Rape"
Sylvia Plath - "Edge"
Robert Phillips - "Compartments"
Leon Stokesbury - "Evening's End 1943-1970"
Dana Goia - "Planting a Sequoia"
Rita Dove - "Adolescence - III"

amandam's review

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4.0

This was a great poetry anthology to use at the beginning of my Poetry: Form and Meaning class. We used the prose (though supplemented it for some other perspectives on reading and writing poetry) a great deal, and it was nice to have a wide selection of poems to choose from for each class meeting. The variety is good, and we were able to also be spontaneous and choose poems for quick reading circles and projects. When we approached or sought out more contemporary poets, newer poets students might feel a stronger connection to, and poets of more diverse backgrounds, we needed to move outside the book.
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