Chekhov's Mistress
Poetry List at the Poetry Foundation
I occasionally wander around the offerings at the Poetry Foundation’s elegant – even if a bit muddled – Website where I found Joshua Weiner’s list of best poetry anthologies. It’s amusing because he juxtaposes such things as Bartlett’s Poems for Occasions and Huntington Cairns’ three volume The Limits of Art.
Here’s what Weiner had to say about a couple of his other choices:
The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse
We can’t really recognize the best poems without having some knowledge of the worst. One finds here “the richest gleanings” from the field of Bad Verse as of 1930. The editors are quick to assure us that the book contains “only good Bad Verse—in other words, it is written according to the rules, it is grammatical, its rhythms, rhymes and metres are impeccable.” Herein a reader will find, for example, Julia Moore, “the sweet singer of Michigan,” parodied by Twain in Huckleberry Finn, though she hardly required it: her poem “Byron: A Critical Survey” begins, “ ‘Lord Byron’ was an Englishman / A poet I believe, / His first works in old England / Was poorly received.” It gets better, or worser, from there. An editor could no longer compile this kind of anthology; all the rules have changed, and consensus over what even constitutes a poem is impeded by apparently incommensurable differences.
The Best Poems of the English Language edited by Harold Bloom (HarperCollins) [Weiner’s #1 pick]
Although this volume has fewer poems than William Harmon’s Top 500 (see no. 3), Bloom’s commentaries are penetrating, sometimes eccentric, and often brilliant. He acknowledges that such an anthology is an argument, and he argues his case passionately and persuasively.
You’ll also find some audio archives on the site, poetry photographs (on Flikr no less) and pretty much anything else they could find laying around.
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