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sofiadidonato's review
emotional
medium-paced
3.5
This is a good anthology to help get into poetry. I was able to find some authors that I didn’t know yet, but liked what these small samples showed, and will be looking into those into the future. It was great to revisit some classics favorites too. As this collection is filled with XIX/XX century poetry only, many of the poems are very metric and kinda boring to me.
brianzhamilton's review
4.0
Never really having read poetry, I picked this book up to acquaint myself a little better. There are some really great poems in here, and this book serves as a good introduction into the art. The following is a list of authors and their poems I liked, in no particular order except the order they occur in the book (which is roughly chronological according to when the authors lived):
William Cullen Bryant
* “Thanatopsis”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* “Concord Hymn”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
* “The Arrow and The Song”
* “The Children’s Hour”
* “The Day Is Done”
Edgar Allan Poe
* “Annabel Lee”
* “The Conqueror Worm”
* “The Raven”
Herman Melville
* “Misgivings”
Walt Whitman
* “I Sit and Look Out”
* “O Captain! My Captain!”
* “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”
* “My Life Closed Twice before It’s Close”
* “Success Is Counted Sweetest”
* “There Is No Frigate like a Book”
Emma Lazarus
* “The New Colossus”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
* “Solitude”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
* “Richard Cory”
Stephen Crane
* “I saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon”
* “War Is Kind”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
* “The Lesson”
Robert Frost
* “Fire and Ice”
* “Mending Wall”
* “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
* “The Road Not Taken”
* “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
Carl Sandburg
* “Fog”
* “I Am The People, The Mob”
Vachel Lindsay
* “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”
* “Euclid”
* “The Leaden-Eyed”
William Carlos Williams
* “This Is Just to Say”
* “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
Robinson Jeffers
* “Shine, Perishing Republic”
* “Shine, Republic”
Marianne Moore
* “Poetry”
Claude McKay
* “The Tropics in New York”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
* “First Fig”
* “Recuerdo”
Langston Hughes
* “I, Too”
* “Mother to Son”
* “Still Here”
Countee Cullen
* “For Paul Laurence Dunbar”
* “Incident”
William Cullen Bryant
* “Thanatopsis”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* “Concord Hymn”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
* “The Arrow and The Song”
* “The Children’s Hour”
* “The Day Is Done”
Edgar Allan Poe
* “Annabel Lee”
* “The Conqueror Worm”
* “The Raven”
Herman Melville
* “Misgivings”
Walt Whitman
* “I Sit and Look Out”
* “O Captain! My Captain!”
* “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”
* “My Life Closed Twice before It’s Close”
* “Success Is Counted Sweetest”
* “There Is No Frigate like a Book”
Emma Lazarus
* “The New Colossus”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
* “Solitude”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
* “Richard Cory”
Stephen Crane
* “I saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon”
* “War Is Kind”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
* “The Lesson”
Robert Frost
* “Fire and Ice”
* “Mending Wall”
* “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
* “The Road Not Taken”
* “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
Carl Sandburg
* “Fog”
* “I Am The People, The Mob”
Vachel Lindsay
* “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”
* “Euclid”
* “The Leaden-Eyed”
William Carlos Williams
* “This Is Just to Say”
* “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
Robinson Jeffers
* “Shine, Perishing Republic”
* “Shine, Republic”
Marianne Moore
* “Poetry”
Claude McKay
* “The Tropics in New York”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
* “First Fig”
* “Recuerdo”
Langston Hughes
* “I, Too”
* “Mother to Son”
* “Still Here”
Countee Cullen
* “For Paul Laurence Dunbar”
* “Incident”
leslierholm's review
5.0
101 great American poems
The editors chose some of the best poetry ever written; not just in America. I love it, I love this book and I recommend it whether you're new to poetry or an old veteran wanting to re-read some of your favorites.
The editors chose some of the best poetry ever written; not just in America. I love it, I love this book and I recommend it whether you're new to poetry or an old veteran wanting to re-read some of your favorites.
ian_bond's review
4.0
While not hitting all "Great American Poets" and missing anything from the last 60 years, I do think this book gives a nice overview of America through the eyes of some of its greatest linguists. There are only one or two poems for most poets, with more given to Frost, Hughes, and a few others, but it does include several very famous poems and many others of rich quality. And for those who want to travel through American history and language, I find it a great, quick resource.
andipants's review
4.0
Good selection of American poetry from colonial times to the Harlem Renaissance and (slightly) beyond. The pieces are arranged chronologically by author, with a biographical sentence or two about each author. I first got this book for class in high school, so several pieces were familiar (and of course, I've encountered several of them in other places as well -- they're all fairly well-known) but I don't recall that we read it cover to cover, so now I've rectified that. I liked Walt Whitman less than I remembered, and T.S. Eliot more. Go figure. Anyway, a quite decent collection for one who likes the classics, and/or aspires to basic cultural literacy in poetry.
connie575's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
5.0
jeanbigurra's review
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
5.0
sitibbetts7's review
5.0
Some of my highlights :
“So shalt thou rest - and what if though shalt fall
Unheeded by the living - and no friend
Take note of thy departure?”
-William Cullen Bryant
“And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.”
-Edgar Allen Poe
“I could not sleep I’d I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.”
-Frances E. Harper
“Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.”
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-
A field where a thousand corpses lie.”
-Stephen Crane
“I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.”
-Langston Hughes
“And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
…
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
…
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—“
-T.S. Eliot
“And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom. You did not say 'en masse,' you said 'independence.' But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also. Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.”
-Robinson Jeffers
“Peace flows into me As the tide to the pool by the shore; It is mine forevermore, It ebbs not back like the sea. I am the pool of blue That worships the vivid sky; My hopes were heaven-high, They are all fulfilled in you. I am the pool of gold When sunset burns and dies— You are my deepening skies, Give me your stars to hold.”
-Sara Teasdale
“You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.”
-Ezra Pound
“I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.”
-Carl Sandburg
“So shalt thou rest - and what if though shalt fall
Unheeded by the living - and no friend
Take note of thy departure?”
-William Cullen Bryant
“And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.”
-Edgar Allen Poe
“I could not sleep I’d I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.”
-Frances E. Harper
“Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.”
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-
A field where a thousand corpses lie.”
-Stephen Crane
“I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.”
-Langston Hughes
“And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
…
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
…
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—“
-T.S. Eliot
“And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom. You did not say 'en masse,' you said 'independence.' But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also. Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.”
-Robinson Jeffers
“Peace flows into me As the tide to the pool by the shore; It is mine forevermore, It ebbs not back like the sea. I am the pool of blue That worships the vivid sky; My hopes were heaven-high, They are all fulfilled in you. I am the pool of gold When sunset burns and dies— You are my deepening skies, Give me your stars to hold.”
-Sara Teasdale
“You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.”
-Ezra Pound
“I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.”
-Carl Sandburg
mrjesse's review
5.0
I love this anthology so much because it has so many of my favorite poems. 'Solitude' by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 'The Raven' by Edgar Allen Poe, 'Thanatopsis' by Bryant, and many others. But I also discovered new ones that I'd never even heard of before, like Abraham Lincoln's 'My Childhood's Home I See Again.' This little volume has a permanent place on my shelf!