I have no idea where I picked up this slender volume of poetry to check to see if I paid close to the cover price for it. I don’t know if you remember seeing these out and about around the turn of the century (that is, the end of the 1900s), but Dover Thrift Editions came out with a long line of classic (and out of copyright literature) printed on cheap (but not quite newsprint) paper and priced only a dollar. New. They cannot have been making a mint on it, but they were certainly doing the world a service up until the world, or at least the American public, couldn’t be arsed to spend a buck to read classic literature.
The book’s title does not overstate its case or selection criteria; it is not the best poems, and it does not include anything modern–we get to the middle of the 20th century with Auden, and we’re done–of course, the poems most likely had to be out of copyright in 1998 to make a dollar book possible. It’s got your Broadstreet (1 poem), it’s got your Longfellow (5 poems), it’s got your Poe (3 poems), it’s got a fair share of Whitman (7), one by Abraham Lincoln, 10 by Emily Dickinson, a couple by Stephen Crane, 3 by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 9 by Frost, and then we get into the 20th century hucksters including Carl Sandburg (3), William Carlos Williams (5), Wallace Stephens (4), and only two by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book pays maybe oversized attention to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with two by Langston Hughes and a couple by poets whose names I did not recognize.
A good smorgasbord, though; although I’ve read some Longfellow, Millay, and James Whitcomb Riley (not included in this book) recently (for MfBJN values of “recently”), I’ve been away from Frost for too long (over twenty years? Oh, my god).
I flagged a couple poems as being especially good, including:
- William Cullens Bryant’s “Thanatopsis“–or at least I flagged some lines in it, but I’m not really sure why.
- Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” which I will read again when I get to his complete poems which I bought in 2020 and maybe in Lyrics of Lowly Life which I bought in 2023. The poem includes the line “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me” which is the source for the title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. Shame that she eclipsed Dunbar, but she came into prominence when that was possible.
- Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night“.
- Vachel Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed“. Geez, is this a poem that the world grew into. I am not sure I’ve heard of this poet before; I’ll have to keep an eye out for his works.
By its nature, even with the lesser lights thrown in, still better than most of the poetry I tend to read. Which I shall now return to.
