The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore (Editor)

This classic anthology of American poetry opens in the colonial seventeenth century and closes in the twentieth, emphasizing the extraordinary, vital period that followed the 1950s. Geoffrey Moore's skilled and unobtrusive editorship is careful not to neglect the major figures of the between-wars period, nor the ballads and parodies that can be said to represent the spirit of America. From Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman and Ai, the work in "The Penguin Book of American Verse" displays a poetical spectrum of moods, rhythms, objectives and philosophy as diverse and fascinating as the nation from which it springs.

Genres: Poetry, American, Anthologies, The United States Of America

624 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW TO FOLLOW: "A poem should not mean, but be". Archibald MacLeish.

I once knew a professor, gone now, god bless him, who said his preference in poetry was "poetry I can understand". Do you understand the bat hanging upside down, Prof.? Or the salmon in Washington state swimming upstream? Do you understand America? The whole country is here in THE PENGUIN BOOK OF AMERICAN VERSE, or a guide for the perplexed about the USA: God to ghetto, prairie to Beat punk, Ann Bradstreet to Nikki Giovanni, yes, American poetry begins and ends with women at the pen station; "The death of America rides in on the smog"? Not here, not while her versifiers can still chant democratic. This brilliant anthology, compiled by Geoffrey Moore, is a testament to America's greatest strength: her diversity. No schools of poets here, or "me-tooers". What we read instead is a progression from a colony where God prevailed to the new man (sorry, ladies) of the prairies, free, instinctual, and one with the wilderness; the transcendentalists who take god for nature and vice versa, the giant of the republic of letters; Walt Whitman, who wants no god or king outside the individual; populists, with a small "p", like Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters, singing for a forgotten and despised America; the first stirrings of African-American poesy in ballads, "John Henry" and Frankie and Johnny", anyone?; the poets of the new industrial civilization, THE PEOPLE, YES!, and then, the individual begins to fragment; Pound and Eliot hail and lament the lost classical tradition sacrificed to the gods of modernity, "a botched civilization", and what survives after the chaos and malaise? Beauty, art, the word. So long as I can dream, says the poet, I can save this mighty goddess and refuse of a civilization; the new female poets, H.D. and Amy Lowell above the rest, sing of estrangement and the loss of freedom; up in Harlem Langston Hughes and Coleen Cullen speak of Negro rivers run dry and dreams deferred; Robert Frost of rural, snowy America and private anguish; Hart Crane dwarfed by the behemoth of "The Bridge"; Wallace Stevens making language the subject of his verse, "Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame"; William Carlos Williams confirms this view by writing American haiku; the Beats beatify drugs, sex and the drifter, V.D. and toilets, consumer products, Fords, soap, dandruff remover, advertising signs; are these things not America too? Then, why not shout out their existence? Bukosky and Corso make poetry from bathroom graffiti and lost girlfriends, John Ashbery and James Merrill of lovers, mirrors, and the post-modern blues, and at last Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez give us politics, race, abortions, and the chance of recovery through poetry.

Writing a review of a poetry anthology is like composing a sex manual. The joy is in the doing, not in reflection or instruction. What I shall point to in this review is some signposts along the way of American poetry growing shoulders, headed to grassland, rivers, and seas, both real and of the imagination, including though not joining us all in the web of words. "The Prairies" by William Cullen Bryant erases the line between man and rivers, bees, grass, culverts, and cross-roads. I need not the Great Father nor the mantle of Europe, he cries. When you touch the soil, you touch me, and this is all we shall ever see of heaven. Poe dragged his countrymen down into the abyss with him. You think you rule the world? Nay, "death is the conqueror worm". Live conquers all? Tell that to my Annabel Lee. THE SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY of Edgar Lee Masters drags into the American dream the "blind as a bat" victim of the boss's cruelty, and the poor, naive German immigrant farm girl, taken advantage of by her employer and his greedy wife; she can't even proclaim "That's my son!" at the county fair. Vachel Lindsay celebrates, then bemoans the loss of "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!" to Hannah, his puppet McKinley, and the America of "the silly...and the spats". The twentieth-century poets embrace a quieter rebellion. Wallace Stevens, in "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is sure the world is language and vice versa. We need no religion ("Sunday Morning"), metaphysics, ideology, or any other "order" above or beyond us. We are remaking our world every minute through words, and don't even know it. Did this boy have a telephone link to Wittgenstein? Actually, it was his old Harvard professor George Santayana. Ezra Pound, in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" and "The Wayfarer" says the gift and challenge of the poet is "to pluck from the air a live tradition". T.S. Eliot blasts us with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; an old man wandering lonely, playing with the tie and haircut that once made him look young. Allan Ginsberg takes up the way of Walt Whitman, whom he sees "at the supermarket, eyeing the stock boys". The truth of America can now be found among her discarded children. Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton and the other "confessional poets" comb their wrecked lives for a last gasp of air: "Dying is and art, and like everything else I do it uncommonly well". Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth find America out in the wild West, with grasshoppers for kings. Sonia Sanchez uses poetry to get her anger at whitey off her chest in "TCB", and after exhaling, invites us to build a new America together. Nikki Giovanni says spare me your sympathy for the poor Black woman; I am beautiful and complicated, just like you. THE PENGUIN BOOK is like America itself: exhausting, perplexing, demanding, oppressive to the original and outcast, and forever a font of dreamy wisdom.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. If you like reading poetry, I would thoroughly recommend this collection

[Gavin Lightfoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great poetry, some awful, but I've discovered a number of new, to me, poets to explore.

[Lau Saili · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up as a core text first year university 20th Century Literature and am unafraid to say it is my literary Bible. I have never stopped reading it. There is always a new voice to discover or insight or inspiration to be had.

At the time I was so sick of classical poetry, especially English; the Americans in the 20th century were such a breath of fresh air.

I often simply open it up at random and read. William Carlos Williams and all who followed, particularly the Beat Poets and similar are perennial favourites.

[Joe Avary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not a student of poetry by any means, so this collection presented a chronological overview of American poetry as seen through the eyes of a British curmudgeon.

The blurb on the cover says “a very useful book” and it was useful, for helping me realize that the bulk of poetry from writers born from 1600-1900 is pretty much unreadable.

But it gets better and better as the book goes on which, I guess gives me hope in some sort of way. Like, the past wasn’t always that great.

[BookLovingLady (deceased Jan. 25, 2023...) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never read my poetry books from cover to cover, I just keep picking out bits and pieces... It's an ongoing process.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally speaking, I'm a front-to-back reader, in the sense that I start on the first page (or in the case of a long-winded introduction, the first *real* page of a work) and proceed until the last page of prose. It's not difficult to do when regarding a work of fiction like a novel or a non-fiction book. Most of those have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anthologies, though, be they of prose or verse, are a bit more ambiguous. Do you start at the very beginning and read everything in order of its appearance? Do you take the "choose your own adventure" approach of skipping around, going back and picking up stuff that you ignored at first? Or do you just do the picky-eater approach, focusing on only the things you know you'll like, or material from authors whose work is unfamiliar to you?

In the case of "The Penguin Book of American Verse," edited by Geoffrey Moore, I decided to abandon my "beginning to end" approach and simply skip almost half the way through the collection. Why? Not because the poems and authors from the first fee centuries of American poetry are bad; they're just very familiar. I've read Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson before; none of the poems from them included here are ones that I wasn't at least passingly familiar with. So I jumped straight into the middle of the nineteenth century, and picked and chose from there.

That means I did read Gwendolyn Brooks but I skipped Charles Bukowski, among others. I will say that I appreciate the (bare minimum) diversity of some of the poets selected. Langston Hughes gets some play here, as do the Beats and others. But it's a very white-male collection, in keeping with notions that are outdated today.

So technically, I didn't *complete* this book, I just moved the parts of the literary salad that I didn't care for or had already sampled in order to get to the ingredients and morsels I was unfamiliar with. But I think that's allowed with poetry collections, or short-story anthologies, or essay collections. This is a fine primer for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of American poetry, but don't just stop at this one. Consider following it up, for example, with the collection of Black poetry that poetry Kevin Young compiled for the Library of America (I read it last year, one of my favorite books from that year).

[connie]

i love to cheat

[Ying Highfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some bad, but when it's good it's really good 😂

[Heather Dunnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I definitely waned in and out of this at various points but on the whole I think it's a fair construction of the country. There's still some weird choices, like the inclusion of the entirety of Song of Myself and some other longer works because although when you're looking at canonisation of a nation they're necessary inclusions I don't think any work that can stand on its own right belongs in an anthology and could have allowed secondary poems for some poets instead.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is rather disturbing to read an anthology where the editor is so patronisingly unimpressed about the subject. Yeah yeah, we get it - the British are the bestest at literature, and the foolish Yanks are so adorable in their attempts to write poetry.

Mr Moore (ed.) would have been better off not venturing outside the University of Hull - it is surely a glorious world of words where pesky foreigners never venture

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