Anthology of Modern American Poetry

Rating:
Summary: Mediocre
Review: A lot of the less familiar poetry in this collection is just plain terrible. The baby boomer poets are the worst of all. It's depressing. You're better off with a Norton anthology.

Rating:
Summary: Questionable editing
Review: Anthologies are tough things to edit, I'm sure. After all, any anthology of literature printed by, say, Oxford, or Norton especially, has the kind of power necessary to grant its contents canonical status in literary study. Furthermore, the Norton anthologies tend to have immediate canonical status themselves.

Perhaps this is why Nelson takes so many chances with this anthology, some for better, and some for worse. I did not want to stick him with a 2 star rating, so I gave him a 3, but whereas I normally consider a 3-star rating as a kind of "yes, I liked it while I was reading it," this time I give it because I'm trying to average the times he made excellent choices with the times he seems to miss the mark.

The most questionable of Nelson's decisions? Easy. His decision to publish Japanese haiku from World War 2. No, that's not the questionable part. But he edits them all together to form one long poem. He takes haiku from many different authors and turns it into a Harmonium-era Stevens poem. This move defies all sense.

However, it also illustrates what is great in Nelson's anthology: inclusiveness. He goes to great lengths to include authors you might not find in other anthologies; and if you would find them, chances are you will find more poems by these poets in Nelson's anthology, or at least different poems. It bests the Norton Anthology in the Harlem Renaissance department, that's for sure. I'd never heard of Angelina Welde Grimke, for instance, who's just an amazing poet who was writing Plath well before Plath.

It is indeed irksome that this inclusiveness is sometimes at the expense of the "major" poets in the American canon: poets like Stevens get ridiculously short treatment, and half of the time, their most important or recognizeable poems are left out entirely. While I appreciate that Nelson wants to open up the canon a little bit (okay, a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that), his anthology feels a little incomplete in a field in which the Norton still casts the tallest shadow. Meaning that, while no anthology can stand alone and requires supplementation, Nelson's requires much more supplementation merely because his exclusions fly in the face of what is, for better or worse, required reading by current canonical standards.

So, if you plan to use this anthology in a class, you will probably need to supplement many of the authors with photocopies. But chances are you were going to do that anyway.