The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn: In Two Hundred Poems

by Elsinore Books, Teresa Keyne

Here are 200 of the most beautiful and best-loved poems in the English language collected and arranged especially for Kindle readers. The design of this anthology is inspired by the structure of a sonnet, with 14 Poems for 14 Love; Parting and Sorrow; Inspiration; Mystery and Enigma; Humour and Curiosities; Rapture; A Door Opens, A Door Closes; Memory; Tales and Songs; Nature; Cities; Solitude; Contemplation; and Animals. There are poems for every mood and occasion, and alongside the more famous works, are some lesser known gems of English poetry. Included are masterpieces by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Christina Rossetti, and many other outstanding poets. Please view the preview of this book for a full listing. At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful Kindle Books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between the poems. We regularly update the formatting of our books, to ensure they will always remain perfectly accessible on all Kindle models. This book is part of the Best of Poetry series, which also The Best of Shakespeare, Muse of Fire The Best of In the Blue and Silver Night The Best of A Young Person’s Book of Evergreen Verse Foreword Anthologies of English verse are as abundant as mushrooms after rain. So why create another? Our defence amounts to the kind of anthology that we wanted to own did not exist. Our aim has been to compile an intricately structured anthology of classic English verse, in which the poems are arranged so as to strike fire off one another, and thereby bring new light to familiar lines. We wanted there to be a sense of inevitably in the structure of the anthology, as well as in the placement of the poems within it. This book is organised as a sort of sonnet sequence, with fourteen poems for fourteen themes. A two-poem prologue and epilogue bring the collection to exactly 200 poems. In selecting which poems to include, we have tried to present the best-loved poems in the English language alongside some less commonly anthologized masterpieces. Each theme in this anthology is introduced by two or three short meditations on the nature of poetry. Taken together, these pensées give some idea of the beauty, enchantment, and richness that poetry can offer. But it is in the poems themselves that the real treasure is to be found. We hope you will enjoy reading them.

Genres: Poetry

434 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 2, 2014

Reviews

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some fine old chestnuts here but many others I hadn't encountered before. A pretty special anthology and a joy to read.

[Shawn Thrasher · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many incredible poems gathered here. I discovered some new poems and poets (Charlotte Mew's The Call has stuck in my mind ever since I read it) and re-discovered some old favorites (John Donne, Wordsworth). My mother-in-law kept a button jar. She's had to move into a care home, and we found the jar when we were cleaning out her house. The button jar was full of old buttons, new buttons, strangely shaped buttons, buttons of all colors, shapes and sizes, fantasy button, plain old buttons. That's how I would describe this anthology: it's like a button jar. Not every button in the button jar was beautiful; not every poem in here was meaningful to me right now. Like those buttons, I may appreciate even the non-beautiful poem at some future point in my life. That what makes poetry so cool.

[MsSwisis · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: Hold on!’

[Dan Gobble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my usual fare, in regards to poetic styles. I've mostly stuck with more modern poets and free verse. But this collection gave me a greater appreciation of ryhming poems, as well as pre-1900's poetry and authors.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great variety.Nice springboard to other poets.

I am relatively new to appreciating poetry. This was a great introduction to some works I might never have stumbled across. Some truly great ones by recognizable names.

[Adam Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine anthology in fourteen sections which is also the number of lines in a Sonnet.

[Shantanu Abhyankar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite musings

Nice, just nice, curl up in a corner with this and immerse yourself in some insightful poetry.
These are some of the best poems in English language

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of poems to start my journey into poetry!

[Claire Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid collection; I would have loved to see some summaries or helpful footnotes for older poems.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection that gathers 14 poems for each of 14 different themes. If you’re a math whiz, you know that means it’s a collection of 196 poems, but they round it out with four bonus poems to make a clean 200. If you’re a poetry reader, many of these poems will be familiar. They’re classic works from master poets from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries (a few earlier.) Still, they are worth revisiting, the collection is inexpensive, and the organization, itself, is thought-provoking.

The fourteen themes that create the organizational schema for the book are: 1.) rapture: words that burn, 2.) a door opens; a door closes, 3.) love, 4.) humor & curiosities, 5.) memory, 6.) nature, 7.) tales & songs, 8.) solitude, 9.) contemplation, 10.) mystery & enigma, 11.) parting & sorrow, 12.) animals, 13.) inspiration, and 14.) cities. Then there are a couple bonus poems each attached to both the introduction and the epilogue.

As mentioned, the poets are mostly household names of English-language poetry, including: Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Hardy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Ben Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Wordsworth, A. E. Housman, Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Frost. There are some names that are less than household names, but none that are obscure to poetry aficionados.

Again, many of the poems are well-known. Some of them are fragments of long poems, but most are stand-alone works. Examples of some of the standards include: “Chicago” by Sandburg, “If” by Kipling, “The Road Not Taken” by Frost, “Let My Country Awake” by Tagore, “The Tiger” by Blake, “The Raven” by Poe, “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge, “The Daffodils” by Wordsworth, “The Jabberwocky” by Carroll, “She Walks in Beauty” by Byron, and “There Is No Frigate Like a Book” by Dickinson.

I enjoyed this collection. I’d read most of these poems before, but the vast majority deserve re-reading and re-reading again. I’d recommend it for poetry lovers.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of poems

[James E. Bend · Rating 4 out of 5]

James E. Bend

I have memorized several of these poems.
Some make me think,
Some make me laugh and
Some made me cry.