The Top 500 Poems

Rating:
Summary: companionable and alive.
Review: If you're looking for a book to study with, you probably shouldn't go for this one--as other reviewers have pointed out, it doesn't have footnotes or numbered lines. On the other hand, footnotes and numbered lines can be distracting or off-putting--a book that encourages that sort of analysis reminds me of musty classrooms and teachers who use poetry as a punishment. The lack of standard notation makes it possible to look at a poem and decide for yourself how to pick it apart; Harmon's conversational commentary makes each poem feel more deeply personal than it would in a standard compilation. Its incompleteness, but the inclusion of so many interesting tidbits encourages readers to find out more. I sincerely doubt you'd find notes of so much variety in any other compilation--info on a poet's life, a drug problem, a poem's popularity, Harmon's own thoughts, a few interesting words. It's a perfect place to begin. What makes poetry interesting is found here.

Rating:
Summary: me gusto mucho
Review: Me gusto mucho este libro, prestamo que me hizo una amiga por un par de meses, no los lei todos claro, ni me agradaron todos, pero me gusto encontrar el ritmo de la poesia inglesa. Esta seleccion es excelente para estudiar y tambien para leer por placer, ya que sus elementos son muy dispares y sus poemas fueron elegidos por la popularidad de que gozaron en su momento y por la cantidad de veces que algunos son citados. disfrutenlo.. LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: me gusto mucho
Review: Me gusto mucho este libro, prestamo que me hizo una amiga por un par de meses, no los lei todos claro, ni me agradaron todos, pero me gusto encontrar el ritmo de la poesia inglesa. Esta seleccion es excelente para estudiar y tambien para leer por placer, ya que sus elementos son muy dispares y sus poemas fueron elegidos por la popularidad de que gozaron en su momento y por la cantidad de veces que algunos son citados. disfrutenlo.. LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Enjoy and become culturally literate
Review: This book is not intended to be a compilation of the greatest poetry in English - although many of the greatest are included. Harmon has a reverence for poetry which shows in both his commentary and also his choice to simply include poems which were most anthologized elsewhere without imposing his own prejudices on the reader. He freely admits as much in the introduction when he calls the nineteenth century the golden age of poetry and believes the twentieth century poets inferior (don't take offense, contemporary lit fans - he believes the best work of the twentieth century is in prose and blames the media for underexposing poetry in general). If Top 500 had been entirely up to Harmon's judgment, it would contain little besides Lord Byron and his friends. I think it is very important to understand that this is not an individual's opinion on the language's finest poetry, but Poetry's Greatest Hits. If a reader can claim a nodding aquaintance with every poem in this book, they have mastered a very important section of cultural literacy.

By providing 750 years of poetry with commentary in chronological form, the reader watches the evolution of short verse in time-lapse photography. Anonymous ballads preserved by laundresses of old give way over the centuries to tightly structured meditations on passion, to the contemporary picking and choosing among forms or leaving them out entirely. After reading Edmund Spenser's gorgeous Prothalamion, published in 1596, Harmon tells us that T.S. Eliot's Waste Land borrows a line from it. John Donne borrows a line from Christopher Marlowe. We are asked to forgive the overt moralizing of "schoolroom poets" such as Holmes, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow in view of the demands of their early nineteenth century audience and appreciate their fine aesthetic qualities instead. The final two poems are Allen Ginsberg's Supermarket in California and Sylvia Plath's Daddy together reflect the spirit and future of modern poetry. Ginsberg's structure is determined by the words he chooses, and although there is no discernible form the lines have a pulse all their own, just as powerful as Shakespeare's perfect rhymes. Plath's verse is Dickensian in her commitment to the sounds she wants to make, sometimes using nonsense words to maintain the structure.

This book is a wonderful springboard for a person who likes poetry and wants to gain a broader knowledge of what kinds of things have been written. From this volume, the reader can decide to learn more about a poet or group of poets referenced only briefly here.

Rating:
Summary: A great collection spanning 500 years
Review: This compilation is wonderful. The poems range from some early anonymous rhymes and songs to interesting selections from the great poets of the English language in the 18th and 19th century to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Given that this list of "Top 500" was based on how often they were included in other anthologies I had expected a "greatest hits" type of collection. But these choices seemed interesting and idiosyncratic enough to make the book wothwhile.

Rating:
Summary: Has its low points, but well worth the money
Review: To begin, it's important to realize that "The Top 500 Poems" was compiled according to popularity in reproduction, not necessarily in terms of quality. It's also faced with the daunting task of representing English poetry from about 1300 or so until the 1900s. Therefore, it unavoidably has a couple of poems included that seem out of place. For instance, I didn't really need to have "The Purple Cow" or "Paul Revere's Ride" compiled for me, and I wouldn't have included a translated version of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. I sincerely doubt if any reader of the book has found all the poems included to his or her liking.

However, the overwhelming quality of the bulk of the book more than makes up for the weak patches. "The Top 500 Poems" is well organized chronologically, giving the reader a definite sense of progression through history. The introductory paragraphs to each author are informative and concise, and the commentary after each poem is brief but illuminating. Most important, of course, are the poems themselves, which at their best glow with the energy of the greatest literature. Personal favorites included here are: "Western Wind," "They Flee From Me," "That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold," "The Sun Rising," "To Penshurst," "The Collar," "To His Coy Mistress," "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "Holy Thursday," "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "Kubla Khan," "Ozymandias," "Ode On a Grecian Urn," "Ulysses," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "God's Grandeur," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Fern Hill," "Church Going," and "Daddy," to name a few. Many, many more poems equally wonderful are included along with these.

So, unless you're absolutely incapable of ceding a dozen slots in the top 500 list to inferior works, this is an incredibly cheap way to acquire a huge mass of wonderful poems. Legitimate greviances against twenty poems or so fall by the wayside next to four hundred and eighty works of genius.