The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost

I'm not a fan of Harold Bloom, his indulgent and all but anachronistic writing style (he once wrote, "I am weary unto death," and I found myself wondering for days whether the man was serious or pulling all of our legs with his wounded critic act) or his baselessly castastrophic assessment of literary studies--this much I must make clear before I proceed to review this magnificent book, a happy exception in his stilted oeuvre. I think many of his theories are taken too far and made, unnecessarily, much too elaborate and obscure. Take, for instance, the entirely sound (and simple) concept of poetic misprision, which could easily have been written about in a single essay (the first chapter, "Clinamen," tells one all one needs to know, really), but which is painfully dragged out for over two hundred pages. Take his masturbatory and ridiculous interpretation of Milton's "Paradise Lost" as an allegory for his own theory of poetic influence, which brings to mind Nabokov's Charles Kinbote and Woolf's Nicholas Greene both, and his laughable claim that the Greek tragedies were Shakespearean and not the other way around. Or take his clear contempt for T.S. Eliot and, more broadly, the more experimental line of American poetics (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen and the like). Or... And yet here, tethered only to the facts of the lives of the many poets whose work he anthologizes (with the notable exception of William Carlos Williams, whose selections he prefaces at great length), Bloom shines, and his passion for literature is in full and glorious (he might say 'contaminative') force. Some of the choices are obvious, others less so, but his introductions to each poet's work are illuminating, his feverish theorizing kept to a minimum (sadly, not because of a newfound restraint but for lack of space), and the overall package works as a terrific compendium of English-language poetry till the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps even the best available as of the writing of this review. His essay-length foreword, "The Art of Reading Poetry" (sold also as a thin standalone volume by Harper Perennial), does not stray often or far from what its title implies and is a great guide for would-be serious students of poetry. All in all, this is of late one of my favorite books, and certainly the one I go back to most because even as I have the complete works of many of the anthologized poets, here their best work is in a single if hardly lightweight volume. Do not hesitate to buy it.

I was a bit surprised when I first skimmed through the book, mainly from the stopping point selection at Hart Crane, born in 1899. I was looking foward to Bloom consolidating some of the 20th century for me, but it wasn't to be. After I sulked a while and started reading, I have found it to be one of, if not, his most approachable and rewarding book (and I have about thirteen of his latter books). What I found especially rereadable and delightful is his essay--"The Art of Reading Poetry," which is in the beginning 30 pages, divided in 8 sections. Bloom takes a very practical approach towards READING poetry and gives some advice that reminds me of his assumed heir: Helen Vendler. For instance HB says we should ask ourselves 4 questions when reading a poem. The first, (roughly from memory) is what does the poem mean, and is that meaning clearly attained. Next, can we deem the poem as simply good, or is it intrinsically well-crafted. And finally does this poem transcend its time or is it a period piece? There are other nuggets that I strongly believe will make their way into anthologies across America in due time, probably once the obtuse personality of Bloom fades and we are left with just his passion and wisdom for literature. There are also introductory essays before the authors that offer us bio information, but of special interest and relevance. Just this morning I read that Willaim Blake and his wife, after a struggling marriage in the beginning, lived the rest of their life in contentment, by all accounts. As a potential buyer, don't be scared of another technical, verbose, theoretical book. And don't think BLoom is trying to make his favorite poems your favorite poems; but see that he is using these poems to illustrate how to interpret and engulf your own favorite poems. This book is Bloom at his most genial and wise, and at times his most personal.

When I 'previewed' this before it came out I overestimated how much would be included. Luckily these sacrifices were made to make room for Bloom's several hundred pages of commentary on the individual poets, into which he incorporates full essays on Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams and others. Several of these, like many essays in his previous book "Genius", are reprinted largely intact from the introductions to his vast series of critical anthologies put out by Chelsea House. The Spenser essay, written over forty years ago, is particularly brilliant and stirring. Also rewarding is the volume's Introduction, where he tackles such topics as the types of metaphor and allusion and the nature of poetic value itself.Though this isn't quite all of "the best" even in Dr. Bloom's view it has many of the English-language poetic touchstones down to about 1930. Longer works like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, The Prelude etc. are represented with brief but powerful excerpts. Bloom caves and gives a few pieces by esteemed poets he detests (Edgar Allen Poe and Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound) as well as some popular poems he's declared a bit overrated in the past (My Last Duchess, Crossing the Bar, [Emerson's] Days, Sunday Morning). A more substantive criticism: the selections from Donne, Swinburne and Yeats seem a little random. Were their very best works deemed too difficult for inclusion?What's important, and priceless, is what *is* included: countless powerful songs, sonnets, elegies, satires and odes; selections you couldn't improve upon from Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Hart Crane and many others; and most of the great mini-epics: Epithalamion, Adonais, The Fall of Hyperion, Goblin Market, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Hunting of the Snark, The Auroras of Autumn.As expected, the most pages are given to perennial Bloom favorites like Milton, Shelley, Whitman, Tennyson and Wallace Stevens... though surely nowhere near as many as he'd wanted to give. Signs of last-minute manuscript chopping appear throughout, actually: there's about a dozen mentions by name of "included" poems nowhere to be found! But while he arranges to have his proofreader shot we should all thank Bloom for his thoughtful distillation of one of the most important artistic traditions the world has known, poetry in English.If only someone would offer him a whole Norton Anthology volume to fill with more of the same!

I've been excited about this book since Dr. Bloom first mentioned it in an interview (with National Public Radio I believe). His taste in poetry is famously excellent and ridiculously well-informed: if you're upset that Poem X by Poet Y isn't present don't think for an instant Bloom hasn't read it forty times and given it the consideration he feels it warrants. But his favorites are long since on the record in lists sprinkled among his many books, and to the extent they depart from consensus they run toward the cerebral, the visionary/spiritual, the head-breakingly complex. Here's what to expect:Chaucer: selections from The Canterbury Tales, including The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Pardoner's Tale. Spenser: selections from The Faerie Queene such as the Garden of Adonis and Mutability episodes, Epithalamion, Prothalamion. Shakespeare: various sonnets and songs; if dramatic extracts are included, expect the heath scene from Lear, the country fair act from A Winter's Tale, the play-within-a-play and final scenes of Hamlet. Milton: Lycidas, l'Allegro, Il Penseroso, sonnets, perhaps Samson Agonistes, the early Satan episodes from Paradise Lost, some of the Eden business. Pope: The Rape of the Lock, selections from The Dunciad. Blake: Auguries of Innocence, The Mental Traveler, To the Accuser Who Is the God of This World, extracts from Jerusalem and from Milton. Wordsworth: the Immortality Ode, Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Ruined Cottage, Michael, extracts from the Prelude (possibly the whole two-book version of 1799). Coleridge: the Rime of course, Kubla Khan, Dejection: an Ode, Frost at Midnight. Byron: Stanzas to the Po, selections from Don Juan, The Vision of Judgement. Shelley: some or all of Prometheus Unbound, surely all of Adonais and the Triumph of Life, possibly The Witch of Atlas; many lyrics headed by Ode to the West Wind, The Two Spirits, Mont Blanc, To a Skylark, Ozymandias, the Jane poems. Keats: both Hyperion fragments, the Odes on an Urn, to a Nightingale, Psyche and Autumn; La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes, various sonnets. Tennyson: poems from Maud and In Memoriam (definitely sections 95 and 103), Ulysses, The Lotos-Eaters etc. Browning: Childe Roland, Andrea del Sarto, Abt Vogler, Caliban Upon Setebos; maybe some of The Pope from The Ring and the Book. Whitman: Song of Myself (earliest version), As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd. Dickinson: The Tint I Cannot Take Is Best among many others. Yeats: Dialogue of Self and Soul, Vacillation, Adam's Curse, The Tower, Meru, Man and the Echo, Cuchulain Comforted. Eliot: The Waste Land, Prufrock, La figlia che piange. Crane: maybe all of The Bridge and Voyages; The Broken Tower, Repose of Rivers. Stevens: he may be audacious and include all of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, and Auroras of Autumn; The Idea of Order at Key West, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Puel