100 Best-Loved Poems (Thrift Editions)

Thin books, lots of authors, beautiful poems and just the right size for my elderly mother. She looked and saw so many of her favorite poems. Worth my money to see my mom smile, her Dementia is getting worse, this helps

Great price for great selection of poetry. Prompt delivery

"The fog comeson little cat feet.It sits lookingover the harbor and cityon silent haunchesand then move on."~Fog, Carl Sandburg100 Best-Loved Poems presents poems from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century. The poets are all familiar, but the poems are more varied and quite a few are poems I'd never read before. In a compilation like this, you'd imagine to find quite a few familiar favorites from high school or college and those did appear throughout.There is comfort in reading poems we tried to understand in school, but didn't have the emotional maturity to fully digest. Now upon reflection, how could we have truly understood "To His Coy Mistress" at 16, a poem born of mature desire. Now nearing forty, I feel I can linger in these poems enjoying every nuance.This classic collection includes brief introductions to each poet and includes some information on poetic forms. In the section of Ballads, you can hear the singsong rhymes as you read so the first poem was a good choice.The poets include: Lord Randal, Sir Patrick Spens, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Edmund Waller, John Milton, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Gray, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Cullen Bryant, John Keats Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.While the poems are not overly culturally diverse and seem to focus on English and American poets, there is a wonderful early translation for "The River-Merchant's Wife: A letter." It was fun to find "The Tyger" by William Blake and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" makes a little more sense to me now. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" makes more sense when you can see a picture. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a reminder of time's destructive powers and William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" speaks of the human condition and the way we connect with nature. William Butler Yeats has a different take on age in "When You Are Old." He speaks more of appreciation than destruction."For oft, when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude;And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the daffodils."~I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William WordsworthThe selections by Emily Dickinson are playful and they made me want to read more of her poems. There are quite a few life lesson poems that are profound in content, like "If-" by Rudyard Kipling, where he speaks of what it takes to me a man. Robert Frost also presents intriguing notions and life choices in his "The Road Not Taken."This collection offers recollections of poetry you may remember and introduces quite a few poems that are less familiar. John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV was new to me, although I had read Holy Sonnet X..."Death be not proud..."As far as romance goes, Ben Johnson's "To Celia" stands out as does Robert Burns' "A Red, Red Rose."100 Best-Loved Poems is a lovely classic collection and it is nice to have all these poems in one book for future contemplation. I will have to agree with everyone else who made comment as to the lack of cultural variety. For this, you may want to seek out poetry collections by Sam Hamill. For me, this was an inexpensive way to expand my poetry knowledge and to remember some of the poems I learned in high school and college."The woods are lovely, dark and deep.But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep."~Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost~The Rebecca Review

This is a volume that all poetry lovers will welcome. Dover Thrift Edition has put out some of the best classics in literature, and at a very modest price. This small but mighty book includes selections from some of the most well-known and best poets. The editor has chosen these poems from the middle ages to the 20th century.Some of the talented poets in this volume include Frost, Milton, Blake, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Houseman, Keats, Sandburg, Poe, Emerson, Yeats, Dickinson, Whitman, Kipling and many, many others. One of the things I personally love about this volume is the brief introduction on each of the poets. This gives the reader information that makes the poet come alive.In conclusion, if you love poetry, you will want this small volume in your library. If you are new to poetry, this book can serve as an excellent introduction to some of the greatest poets and their most loved poems.Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Haiku Moments: How to read, write and enjoy Haiku)

The poetry is excellent--they're best-loved poems because of their timeless qualities; but the Kindle book is lousy if you intend to browse for the right poem according to your mood. Like so many other Kindle books, it lacks an easy way to move around, no index, and poorly "linked" to allow you to pick and choose the right poem for the right occasion. Too bad, as the format is unworthy of the poems.

I must admit I'm not that fluent in poetic verse. I bought this on a whim long ago and I'm glad I did. Its got a lot of famous poems that everyone has heard at some point. Its kind of like learning to speak a different dialect. You have to read it and immerse yourself in it to get the hang of it. This is a good primer.

The Dover “One-Hundred Best Loved Poems” has resonances far beyond the poems on the page. If you read poems in school, reading these will bring back the words like distant, barely traceable memories. Most of these poems belong to the heritage of western culture, and even if you have not read the poem, or don’t remember reading it, you can trace the fine lines where the literary culture has borrowed, stolen or hijacked (all fairly) the words and meaning(s) of these poems.Take Yeats’s poem The Second Coming which has such memorable and well used lines as “things fall apart,” the title of Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel, “the centre cannot hold” used in a variety of titles and contexts, mostly about mental illness and “slouches toward Bethlehem” used by Joan Didion in her famous series of essays about the rise and fall of the 60s.This is only one of 99 reasons to read this collection and get back in touch with some of the central poems of our tradition, and then move on to ever widening circles of poetry and its meaning.

The poems were, unsurprisingly, wonderful. My only complaint with the book is that the text is too small for older eyes.