The school anthologists of the past, knowing their young pupils’ limits, offered many “accessible” poems, usually narrative ones, purveying simple moral instruction in patriotism or religious feeling. But it was assumed that adult readers of poetry could progress beyond “Hiawatha” or “Barbara Frietchie” to works attaining varieties of diction, overlapping intellectual structures, and complex moral reference.

The pleasures of this anthology are, of course, in the poems. Each poet gets a brief biography and list of published works. It goes almost without saying that no anthology is going to make everyone completely happy. Here, Dove dedicates herself to what she calls "the panorama of twentieth-century American poetry," which signals that she will offer a little bit by many poets (176 in all) rather than a more in-depth look at fewer. Thus more than one-third of her poets, including many born in the 1940's and later, are granted only one poem. Accomplished living poets like Carl Phillips, Sherman Alexie, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alberto Rios, Marilyn Nelson, and Joy Harjo, to name a few, are limited to two each. An anthology offers readers a chance to fall in love with poets they've never read, but it's awfully hard to do so on the basis of just one poem. When Dove is not sympathetic to a given poet, her remarks on the poetry itself can be misleading. Her portrait of Stevens gives us a tepid and boring writer: Animals are passing from our lives ; They feed they lion ; You can have it ; Simple truth / Philip Levine The simplest thing to say about Dove’s introduction is that she is writing in a genre not her own; she is a poet, not an essayist, and, uncomfortable in the essayist’s role, she strains for effects (alliteration the favorite) on the one hand and, on the other, falls into mere boilerplate. Before returning to her individual judgments, I want to look at the large outlines of her introduction, which suffers from a simplified history in which epochs have to be accorded a yes and a no, a plus here, a minus there. Treating the beginning of the twentieth century, Dove offers stereotypes and clichés as she lifts the curtain, revealingWell, any number of people have committed suicide without being poets of “personal exposure”; and in the poets named by Dove the causes of suicide other than poetry-writing are numerous (childhood trauma, alcoholism, manic-depressive illness, marital breakdown). Dove’s brisk post hoc, propter hoc diagnosis of these heartbreaking events and their accompanying poems seems oddly imperceptive in a poet. Does anyone have a phone number for the producers of the World's Toughest Job? Because we'd like to petition that they add "poetry anthologist" to their roster of underwater welders, rodeo clowns, ultimate fighters, and pyrotechnicians. Okay, it's true that you won't lose any limbs compiling the "best" verse of the last 100 years, but the occupational hazards are nevertheless intense. At last, 20th century poetry itself! Rita Dove's [anthology] is intelligent, generous, surprising, and altogether thrilling to read—literally, a heart-thumping collection. In her editorial hands the 20th century is broad but sharply contoured. Most other poetry anthologies give us schools, corners, clubs, and identities, but this one gives us something beyond representative that gets at the extraordinary accomplishment and range of multi-vocal American poetry in the century. Dove's selection—and this book—will long stand as the definitive anthology of American poetry." In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy. How did they start? Afresh. How did they do things? Differently. What did they embrace? The new. Even our own uncertain present is evoked with platitudes: we are

urn:oclc:record:1150935535 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier penguinanthology0000unse_w4b7 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2f8c85p6d0 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780143106432The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Pulitzer-winning US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, is your final selection. Archambeau: So I made a few typographical errors in my original comment. Yes, "elide." Yes, "This is less an insult as it is a commentary [in regard to the anthology as genre]." Etc. It's funny--sad--that you'd rather grade me on those slips than on the basis of what I was saying. And sometimes one wonders whether Dove is being hasty. She speaks, for instance, of “the cacophony of urban life on Hart Crane’s bridge.” But the bridge in his “Proem” exhibits no noisy “cacophony”; its panorama is a silent one. The seagull flies over it; the madman noiselessly leaps from “the speechless caravan” into the water; its cables breathe the North Atlantic; the traffic lights condense eternity as they skim the bridge’s curve, which resembles a “sigh of stars”; the speaker watches in silence under the shadow of the pier; and the bridge vaults the sea. The automatic—and not apt—association of an urban scene with noise has generated Dove’s “cacophony.” The automatic—and not apt—association of an urban scene with noise has generated Dove’s ‘cacophony,'” proclaims Vendler upon reaching Hart Crane, and then she proceeds to leave accuracy in the dust. Poor Crane: since Vendler has decreed that he is on my list of grievances, she rushes triumphantly to his defense, countering my description of “the cacophony of urban life on Hart Crane’s bridge” with examples of silence in “Proem,” which serves as the overture to the main work. Agreed, the hushed splendor of this preface is undeniable…but what of the poem itself? A cursory sweep over just the section excerpted in my anthology yields a host of extraordinary sounds: what with trains whistling their “wail into distances,” chanting road gangs, papooses crying—even men crunching down on tobacco quid—my gasp of surprise at Vendler’s blunder can barely be heard.