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The Best Loved Poems of the American People.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 1, 2019
I don't think I've read every poem, but I have read at least 70-80 percent of it. I know I've gone through every page and really like a lot of them. "Casey at the Bat" and its sequels are old favorites.
September 11, 2022
Printed in 1936 but I suspect that, for most people, the title is still accurate. While the book does not include all of my personal "best loved poems" by a long shot, it provides a good overview of poetry that was popular with the American people, back when the American people still cared about poetry. Poetry now is read by a much smaller percentage of the population than it was in the days before there was a radio in every car and a TV in nearly every home (poetry lovers nowadays are more likely to quote lyrics), but this book includes many poems that are still quoted and includes passages familiar to many of the more literate -- or even just those who enjoy media written by the more literate. For example, anyone who ever wondered where "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest" comes from will find it here in a poem named "Derelict."
My taste differs a bit from whatever criteria was used to compile this book. I have a higher tolerance for sap than most and I still found a lot of these poems intolerably sappy. I would have preferred a much larger collection of "Nature" poems; could have happily done without half of the "Memory and Grief" section; I would have replaced "Home and Mother" with a less sappy "Domestic Pleasures" section; and I protest the lack of Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. Now I think on it, I keenly missed my childhood favorites -- I would have liked to have a "Children's Section" with a few from R.L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and something from A.A. Milne and Christina Rosetti's "Who Has Seen the Wind" (and maybe a few Rosetti shorties), along with something from Christopher Morley ("Animal Crackers," "Song for a Little House," or maybe "Moon-sheep"). But those are more observations than complaints; no collection this broad will include everything or please everybody.
My only real complaint about it is that this book has response poems to poems it doesn't include. For example, it has "A Parody on A Psalm of Life" but it doesn't include Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," even though many phrases from Longfellow's poem ("Art is long, and time is fleeting," "Footprints on the sands of time," "Let us, then, be up and doing") are still referenced today, while the other has been forgotten (and is forgettable, IMHO -- Longfellow's poem may be annoyingly upbeat, but it's well-written for all of that). Granted, when the collection gives me a response poem I can generally track down the poem it's responding to on the Internet, but that is not always convenient now and wasn't an option when the book was first printed.
A nice general collection of poems.
My taste differs a bit from whatever criteria was used to compile this book. I have a higher tolerance for sap than most and I still found a lot of these poems intolerably sappy. I would have preferred a much larger collection of "Nature" poems; could have happily done without half of the "Memory and Grief" section; I would have replaced "Home and Mother" with a less sappy "Domestic Pleasures" section; and I protest the lack of Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. Now I think on it, I keenly missed my childhood favorites -- I would have liked to have a "Children's Section" with a few from R.L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and something from A.A. Milne and Christina Rosetti's "Who Has Seen the Wind" (and maybe a few Rosetti shorties), along with something from Christopher Morley ("Animal Crackers," "Song for a Little House," or maybe "Moon-sheep"). But those are more observations than complaints; no collection this broad will include everything or please everybody.
My only real complaint about it is that this book has response poems to poems it doesn't include. For example, it has "A Parody on A Psalm of Life" but it doesn't include Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," even though many phrases from Longfellow's poem ("Art is long, and time is fleeting," "Footprints on the sands of time," "Let us, then, be up and doing") are still referenced today, while the other has been forgotten (and is forgettable, IMHO -- Longfellow's poem may be annoyingly upbeat, but it's well-written for all of that). Granted, when the collection gives me a response poem I can generally track down the poem it's responding to on the Internet, but that is not always convenient now and wasn't an option when the book was first printed.
A nice general collection of poems.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews