100 American Poems

by Selden Rodman (Editor)

A distinguished treasury of America's Finest Verse. Selections Ralph Waldo EmersonHenry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry DDavid ThoreauOliver Wendell HolmesEdgar Allan PoeWalt WhitmanHerman MelvilleJohn Greenleaf WhittierEmily DickinsonStephen CraneSidney LanierEdwin Arlington RobinsonRobert FrostCarl SandburgVachel LindsayT.S. EliotEzra PundRobinson Jefferse.e. cummingsMarianne MooreWallace StevensGertrude SteinThomas Wolfeand many thersHere are memorable poems by every important poet in the history of the United States, selected by an outstanding critic and poet. Containing lyrics, epics, andd ballads from colonial days to the present, this volume also includes examples of the uniquely American folksongs, cowboy ballads, spirituals and railroad chanteys which are interwoven into the fabric of the nation's life.

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Cary Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was a prolific American writer of poetry, plays and prose, political commentary, art criticism, Latin American and Caribbean history, biography and travel writing—publishing a book almost every year of his adult life, he also co-edited Common Sense magazine.

Reviews

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up in a used bookshop (the edition is copyrighted 1948) and was excited to get to reading some poems from my native land. However, I was a little off-put when I read this sentence in the editor’s introduction: “… Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ are inferior and unrepresentative poems by any discriminating standard.”

I thought, “Oh, no. This is one of those editors who only likes works that are too cryptic and incomprehensible for the common man (or woman) to enjoy.” The type who’ll rave about Joyce’s “Ulysses,” but will mock Huxley’s “Brave New World” as lowbrow tripe. Surely, being beloved by massive numbers of readers counts for something.

Having read the book, I’m pleased that the editor took the attitude he did -- not because it presented me with “better” poems, but because it offered more obscure poems than one would expect to see in most such collections. (And they weren’t particularly arduous or tiresome examples.) The book does include all the poets who one would expect to appear, e.g. Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and E.E. Cummings, but there are many lesser known (i.e. lesser remembered) poets as well. The 100 poems include works by about 60 different poets. And, while the big names tend to have more poems per poet, their selections almost invariably don’t include the best-known works of the given poet. Long story short, if you get a chance to pick up this collection, you’re likely to find some selections that are more obscure but none-the-less great.

As one can imagine from the fact that it includes examples from those twin pillars of American poetry – Dickinson and Whitman – one can expect both metered / rhymed poems as well as free verse. [More of the former in the early part and the latter among the latter pieces.] Poems that are longer than about three pages are generally excerpted. So, there’s a mix of short and intermediate length poems, but only excerpts of long ones. The only ancillary matter is the Introduction, which does give the reader an overview of not only what he / she will be reading, but also some general information on the flow of the American poetry from colonial times through the first half of the 20th century.

I enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it for readers interested in American poetry from the early 18th through the early 20th centuries.

[Beverley Sylvester · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is worth reading because there are a handful of great poems and many good ones included in this collection. This collection exposed me to a few poets I did not know previously that I greatly enjoyed. The introduction is interesting and informative but felt more like an essay about the editor's opinions on American poets than a summary of the history of them. It is worth mentioning that it is deeply flawed for this editor to claim this is a thorough overview of all American poets up to 1948 when it does not contain any poets of color (aside from an anonymous "negro spiritual" and an anonymous "negro blues," both of which were, with questionable intent, written in dialect and lacked complexity and nuance) although there were prominent poets of color published at that time (Langson Hughes, Gwnedolyn Brooks, etc). Lastly, I was sometimes frustrated by Rodman's decision to abridge many poems that were not exceedingly long and could have been included in their entirety.

[Jamie Ander · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was kind of difficult to understand some of the poems but I enjoyed reading many different types of poems from multiple poets. There were some from poets I knew like Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and many I never heard of but they were all very interesting and well done.

[Dano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely classic poems