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The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
Binding: Hardcover
Author: Harold Bloom
Release Date: 2004-03-16
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Average Rating: 4.0
Total Customer Reviews: 16
List Price: $34.95
Sales Rank: 90708
Product Description
The Best Poems of the English Language is the culmination for Harold Bloom of his lifelong love of poetry. It is a comprehensive anthology that offers the reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The vast scope of this anthology begins with Chaucer and ends with poets whose births predate 1900. Bloom has culled his selection according to his three absolute criteria: aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom. Featured in this volume is a substantial and significant introductory essay called "The Art of Reading Poetry." This essay presents Bloom's critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves best, and conveys his passionate concern for how a poem should be interpreted and appreciated. Throughout this anthology, Bloom includes extensive introductions to each poet and to many of the individual poems. In such commentaries, Bloom guides the reader through what is most relevant for a true understanding of the more than one hundred poets selected. The Best Poems of the English Language is regarded by Harold Bloom as his most significant meditation upon all those poets in English who have formed his mind. Here in one volume is an abundance that can never be exhausted.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: great and terrible Hard to give a rating because there is some stellar poetry in this book, but much of the commentary is useless. It is fairly easy to present stellar poetry when you have the history of poetry to choose from. Bloom has some good insights, but is way too full of his own arrogant opinions for this reader. On the other hand you will discover some obscure poems in this anthology that you've never read before, and rediscover a few older ones. Overall, I'd say this book is a service to poetry, but yeesh, you really have to make room for Bloom. Easily the most slanted anthology I've ever read, which is really saying something, because they are all slanted one way or another.
Product Review Summary: Bloom at his editorial best This is one of those unfortunately common instances where I wish there were half-stars in the Amazon rating system, as this work is more than a "4" to me but less than perfection. I rationalize the "5" by observing some of the unfair and apparently arbitrary "1"s that Bloom's approach to literature is bound to stir up.
One expects that those politicizing literary approaches and idols that the aesthete Harold Bloom tears down to object to any of his works, let alone one so boldly titled "The Best Poems of the English Language". However, unlike most "Best Poems" collections Bloom's selection is broad if not always deep, and consequential if not reflectively conscientious. The poems Bloom includes in this collection are /good/, and Bloom carefully explains why they were picked, and why perhaps more popular or traditional works are ignored. There are a few surprises here, but I predict these are the poems we will return to 50 years in the future, when serious readers realize most extraneous influences on literary criticism and editorial choice are irrelevant.
I dump praise on Bloom because he is delightfully insightful and incisive. He does not pull punches, and has the experience of a lifetime of literary criticism and writings to back himself up. This is not to say that his critical style is neutral or wholly impartial; as another reviewer pointed out, Bloom may come off as a "bully" at times. But his selections
If you love poetry, and if you love the English language, Bloom's selection is for you. But if you're more concerned with Eurocentric hedgemony than aesthetics, and more sensitive to cultural egalitarianism than to effective rhetoric, you'll probably agree with the reviewers who didn't actually read this work, but rated it extremely low anyway.
Product Review Summary: What the %^&*?! You are probably better off buying something a textbook from the Norton. Because
1. The editor is biased again women and minority poets. To quote Cary Nelson in the Virginia Quarterly Review,
"If Bloom's wholesale elimination of poems by women and minorities is disgusting and deplorable, however, it is not especially interesting. It is simply part of the conservative backlash against muticulturalism."
2. He is a conservative who does not like modern experimentation.
3. He is biased against poems that show the ugly side of life (ex. war poems, poems about protest or violence).
4. He flatly rejects some of the best poems in history that pushed the limits of the English language.
5. His idea of the Sublime idea is still stuck in early part of the 19th century.
Mr. Bloom, you disappoint me.
So go please and find some true poetry. There's a whole WORLD out there.
Product Review Summary: Good, but not perfect I can't say I buy many anthologies of poetry; instead, I prefer to buy the collected works of poets I find interesting or about whom I am curious. This one, however, caught my eye. I have read other works by Bloom, including the WESTERN CANON, and I figured I'd see what he has to say about these poets.
The title should be taken tongue-in-cheek. Any selection of poetry is going to be highly subjective, especially when it is proclaimed to be THE BEST. Those criticizing the exclusion of certain poets are a bit off in their criticism; this is BLOOM'S selection of the best, and no other man's selection of the best poetry is going to be the same as yours, mine, or the dude who lives at the end of the street's.
You may ask, then: why should we care? The answer lies partly in Bloom's criticism, and partly because Bloom's erudition lends itself well to such anthologies.
By the first, I mean that his criticism is good. Not great; good. There are certainly sparks of illumination herein--I found the sections on Spenser, Wordsworth, and a few others particularly good--but in general it is pretty superficial, in the sense that his criticism does not delve very deep into any one poem or another (with the exception of maybe the FAERIE QUEENE, though no work of criticism can go deep enough into that!). Bloom instead prefers to skate along the surface of the poems, but, in so doing, he makes this a very readable and interesting volume, especially for the non-professional.
The second point, on his erudition, is valid because Bloom presents us with some very unknown and forgotten poets who are truly worth remembering. The standard greats are almost all there, but the real gems often lie in the unknowns.
If you are a professor, or somebody particularly well-read in poetry, it is only this last point that will be of value to you. For those of us who are neither (I'm relatively well-read in poetry, but by no means an expert!), Bloom's work is well worth picking up.
Product Review Summary: Our greatest reader's personal anthology Harold Bloom is arguably the greatest living literary critic, a worthy heir to his own great mentors Samuel Johnson, F.C. Bradley, M.H.Abrams and Northrop Frye. Bloom forced to slowdown from composition of his own works while recovering for twenty-months from a triple- bypass put together this anthology of what he regards to be as the greatest poems in the English language. The work it should be noted does not include twentieth century works in part because Bloom believes there are so many fine poets in the twentieth - century it would be almost impossible to do this. He also hoped to avoid the kind of battles he has long been familiar with in which the 'politically correct' issues enter. Bloom makes it clear that those kind of ethnic, gender,sexual orientation issues and other what he calls 'irrelevancies' have nothing to do with the selections he makes in this work. His criteria are in his own words, " The standards of judgment which matter to me,are cognitive achievement, aesthetic splendor, and wisdom: only those three."
So what he provides Chaucer to Hart Crane are by and large selections from the standard canon of English poetry. He also provides a thirty-page introduction on how to read poetry, biographical sketches, and commentary on the poems. Bloom is a tough but loving critic, for whom agon and agony go with his whole understanding of the poetry- making process. The whole business of succeeding poets seeing their predecessors as rivals who they first admire and then must misread to overcome and distinguish themselves from is at the heart of his vision of poetry. But Bloom is also an extremely broad- minded, generous and appreciative reader. His passion for poetry is felt in the commentary, and his life- long dedication sensed in his championing of the selections. It is fitting that the last poet included in the volume is Hart Crane (b. 1899) for it is with a volume of his 'White Bridges' that the then twelve - year old Harold Bloom discovered his love of poetry, and his desire to devote his life to the reading and writing of it. As a great and perhaps unequalled reader, perhaps in terms of his mastery of the whole text of poetic literature the all - time master Bloom transmits to us in love the works he , and it is fair to say most general readers of poetry, have most loved .
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