The 100 Best Poems of All Time

by Leslie Pockell

Overview

This poetry companion puts favourite poetry and poets from around the world at your fingertips, enabling you to revisit the classics, encounter unfamiliar masterworks and rediscover old favorites.

Here, in this compact volume, is a greatest hits collection of the 100 best poems ever written by the world’s greatest poets. This essential collection is perfect for the poetry lover who wants to carry around their favorite poems, and ideal for the reader seeking an introduction to the greatest poems world literature has to offer. The authors included are each represented by his or her best-known and best-loved work, from the Classics (Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Ovid) to the Renaissance (Dante, Petrarch, Villon, Shakespeare) to the Romantics (Schiller, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats) to the 20th Century giants (Pound, Eliot, Frost, Stevens) down to the present day (Ginsberg, Plath, Angelou). Each poem is introduced by a brief head note which details the poet’s life history as well as the poem’s significance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446676816
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	411,840
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Leslie Pockell is the editor of The 100 Best Poems of All Time. Adrienne Avila is the co-author of Everything I've Learned.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
	From The Iliad	1
	He Is More Than a Hero	2
	Psalm 23	3
	From The Song of Songs [Chapter One]	4
	Song 5 to Lesbia	6
	From The Aeneid	7
	From Metamorphoses	8
	Drinking Alone in the Moonlight	9
	Moonlit Night	10
	Madly Singing in the Mountains	11
	Rubaiyat 51	12
	From Inferno	13
	Remembrance	17
	From The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales	18
	The Ballad of Ladies of the Past	19
	Sonnet 18	20
	Go and Catch a Falling Star	21
	Song to Celia II	23
	To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time	24
	Jordan	25
	When I Consider How My Light Is Spent	26
	From The Prologue	27
	To Althea, from Prison	28
	To His Coy Mistress	30
	An Old Pond	32
	Epigram: Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness	33
	Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	34
	To Jeoffry His Cat	39
	Amazing Grace	41
	Tyger! Tyger!	42
	To a Mouse	44
	Ode to Joy	46
	Don't Kill That Fly!	48
	The World Is Too Much with Us	49
	From The Lay of the Last Minstrel	50
	Kubla Khan	51
	A Visit from St. Nicholas	53
	Abou Ben Adhem	55
	She Walks in Beauty	56
	Ozymandias	57
	Thanatopsis	58
	Ode on a Grecian Urn	61
	Concord Hymn	63
	How Do I Love Thee?	64
	Paul Revere's Ride	65
	Barbara Frietchie	70
	El Desdichado [The Disinherited]	73
	The Raven	74
	Ulysses	80
	Old Ironsides	83
	The Owl and the Pussycat	84
	Memorabilia	86
	Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning	87
	From Song of Myself	88
	Battle Hymn of the Republic	90
	Invitation to the Voyage	92
	Dover Beach	94
	Because I Could Not Stop for Death	96
	The Jabberwocky	98
	Convergence of the Twain	100
	Spring and Fall [Margaret, Are You Grieving?]	102
	Tears Fall in My Heart	103
	The New Colossus	104
	Requiem	105
	The Drunken Boat	106
	The Ballad of Reading Gaol	108
	When I Was One-and-Twenty	112
	The Gardener	113
	Waiting for the Barbarians	114
	Casey at the Bat	116
	Gunga Din	119
	Lake Isle of Innisfree	122
	Richard Cory	123
	We Wear the Mask	124
	The Cremation of Sam McGee	125
	Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eveing	129
	The Panther	130
	Sea Fever	131
	Fog	132
	General William Booth Enters into Heaven	133
	Peter Quince at the Clavier	136
	The Highwayman	139
	The Red Wheelbarrow	144
	Ancient Music	145
	The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock	146
	First Fig	151
	Dulce Et Decorum Est	152
	Buffalo Bill's	154
	From Lament for lgnacio Sanchez Mejias [Absence of the Soul 4]	155
	Harlem [Dream Deferred]	157
	Incident	158
	Poetry	159
	Funeral Blues	161
	Visits to St. Elizabeth's	162
	This Land Is Your Land	165
	Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night	167
	A Supermarket in California	168
	Wanting to Die	170
	Daddy	172
	Still I Rise	175
	Index to Titles and Authors	177
	Index to First Lines	183
	Acknowledgments	187

Editorial Reviews

The cover of The Best 100 Poems of All Time promises "[v]erses to move you, lines you'll love, from old favorites to modern classics...," and while they may not live up to the title's hyperbole, they do satisfy the teaser's terms. Though the collection, including poems by Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Shakespeare, Schiller, Issa, Whitman, Baudelaire, Millay, Cullen, Neruda, Plath and Angelou, was edited by Leslie Pockell, the unsigned introduction was written by an editorial "we," who proclaim that "this present collection has as much credibility as many other lists of the best and the greatest that have circulated during the recent turn of the century." One hopes that the actual poems contained herein have more credibility than any list. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These two productions seem the literary equivalent of elevator music. On the first tape, very short poems by Tu Fu, Basho, or Li Po, with no mention of their nationality or that these are even translations, appear beside the single, most familiar quatrain from Omar Khayyam's "The Rubaiyat." Of what use are these (often overly dramatic) fragments? Yet room is made for the 23rd Psalm, "Amazing Grace," and "`T'was the Night Before Christmas." Stefan Rudnicki, reading from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, does a good job of conveying the sound of the original, while poems by Fran ois Villon, Friedrich Von Schiller, or Gerard de Nerval would seem to have been written in modern English. The second tape is even more frustrating, if only because the poets, if not the poems, will be more familiar. It's good to have grade-school favorites such as "Casey at the Bat" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in easy listening range, but "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land"? And then only an eight-line poem by William Carlos Williams. The balance seems terribly wrong here. Since nothing on these tapes enhances a listener's appreciation of poetry, it's impossible to recommend them. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Pockell compiled this collection "to provide a small, easily portable volume that would contain the essential works that most readers would expect to find in a book of the best poems." While this elliptical pronouncement seems to suggest that a readers' poll determined the selections, the editor makes no secret of his criteria. While one may disagree with some of the choices, this has considerable breadth for such a slim volume. A good deal of space is reserved for the classics (beginning with Homer and Sappho and including the 23rd Psalm and Shakespeare's 18th Sonnet), but, of necessity, few works of any length are presented in their entirety. A large proportion of the poems tend to be lyrical, owing to the editor's predilection for poetry that, according to Auden's definition of verse, qualifies as "memorable speech." Perhaps he has gone a little too far in this direction by offering Friedrich von Schiller's "Ode to Joy"-a work that was ennobled by Beethoven's choral setting but sounds somewhat clunky when read straight. Nevertheless, the editor strives to earn the volume wide appeal, presenting poetry of interest to younger readers as well, such as Clement Clarke Moore's famous Christmas poem and Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat." Stephen Spender said that great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. Occasionally, an editor attempts to do the same, and succeeds.

Kirkus Reviews