The Norton anthology of poetry
The fourth edition of this standard work contains 1800 poems by 300 poets, with 600 poems and 100 poets newly included. The anthology offers more poetry by women (40 new poets), with special attention to early women poets. The book also includes a greater diversity of American poetry, with double the number of poems by African American, Hispanic, native American and Asian American poets. There are 26 new poets representing the Commonwealth literature tradition: now included are more than 37 poets from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, South Africa and India.
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What Hacker News says
- Start with The Norton Anthology of Poetry [1], keep going till you're balls deep in Cunt Norton [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Norton_Anthology_of_Poetry
- Rather like music theory, having a highly analytical mind is a boon...eventually. It's so easy to dig into the mathematical structure of it all and not deal with the actual thing. So start with the rollicking and absurd, and read it aloud!. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example. I have yet to meet someone that doesn't get a grin out of that. Isherwood, 'The Common Cormorant'. These are poems that beat you over the head with their structure and meter. Limericks, doggerel, songs from Shakespare plays...and pay attention to where it seems to stutter or skip, where it doesn't work. That is the beginning of training your ear, and recovering the ability to feel and enjoy the sound, making that part of the reading experience. Technical prose has trained that out of us as a matter of self defense because so much technical prose is only tolerable with your ear firmly swathed in cotton wool and stored carefully away.
When you get past the level of limericks and children's poems level, suddenly you have interpretive choices to make because the precise flow and timing of sounds can work different ways and some work better than others, and as a reader you have to bring an interpretive faculty to these works. When you get to something like John Donne's poetry, you're now deep in "every bit of timing and inflection matters."
For children's poetry to get started, Belloc's 'The Bad Child's Book of Beasts' or the Looking Glass Book of Verse are high quality collections. Then it's worth getting something like a Norton Anthology of Poetry as a way of reading very widely very quickly to find out what appeals to you right now, and explore that further.
Many people recommend the Oxford Book of English Verse. I don't, because I think Quiller-Couch had insipid taste and his editing ranges from the uninspired to the positively atrocious (what he did to John Donne's 'The Ecstasy' is horrid). I have found Garrison Keillor's 'Good Poems' to be particularly approachable, high quality collection of verse. I also suggest Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', though you shouldn't take what he writes about Chinese as anything other than a metaphor for his topic at hand.
Spend time with Shakespeare, of course. I recommend the Oxford complete works. I do not recommend the Yale complete works. Did my wife and I have a tiff about that? Yes, we did. Was I able to demonstrate by reference to passages that I was right? Yes. Do we only have the Oxford in the house now? Yes.
Robert Frost's complete works are cheaply had and a necessity for someone studying modern poetry. Two or three poems of his are butchered in every school class, and the full range of what he worked on is generally ignored, because it can require a very finely tuned ear to hear and interpret the force that his longer, narrative poems can produce.
But really, once your ear starts to come together, dig through the Norton anthology and use it as pointers to further things to read.
- I'd second the other commenter's suggestion of an anthology. For a comprehensive anthology with a terrific reference section where you can learn the "technical details" of poetry, I'd recommend The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
- I remember having to suppress a giggle in high school when I ran into "The Vine"[0] in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. It was nice to know people were still the same 400 years earlier.
- One is a genius of entertainment. He's on TV five times a week. TV doesn't do him justice -- he's much more interesting in person. He always knows exactly what to say in any given situation.
One is a genius of memory. He memorized the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry when he was a child. (I'm not even kidding.) In college we all played a game where we would give him the first line of a poem. He would then supply the title of the poem, the author, the year it was published, and generally the rest of the poem, or at least the rest of the first verse. He's a college professor. You've never heard of him, but his students invariably love him. He changes people one at a time.
There are others in this group who are very accomplished in publishing, acting, comedy. I also know a guy whose name is associated with the creation ("discovery") of several elements. (I suspect he glows in the dark from all the radiation he has absorbed, but I haven't actually confirmed that.) Tough crowd if you're in a mood to compare yourself.
