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The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine
“The history of poetry and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable,” wrote A. R. Ammons. Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry magazine established its reputation immediately by printing T. S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Carl Sandburg's “Chicago Poems,” Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning,” and the first important poems of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many other then unknown, now classic authors. Publishing monthly without interruption, Poetry has become America's most distinguished magazine of verse, presenting, often for the very first time, virtually every notable poet of the last nine decades―an unprecedented record. Decade by decade, this bountiful ninetieth-anniversary anthology from Poetry includes the poems of the major talents―along with several lesser known―in all their William Butler Yeats, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Graves, May Sarton, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Hart Crane, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Thom Gunn, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Galway Kinnell. In recent decades, Poetry has presented Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Kenyon, James Tate, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, and many, many others. T. S. Eliot called Poetry “an American institution.” The Poetry Anthology is sure to be an American keepsake.
- GenresPoetryContemporary
576 pages, Hardcover
First published October 25, 2002
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September 5, 2021
[I was originally going to write a critical review of this book, which as friends know I took on this year as part of my first-ever explorations into the world of formal poetry. But the more I thought about it, the more incensed I became by Poetry magazine's warm embrace here of Nazi speechwriter and convicted war criminal Ezra Pound; so I've decided instead to reprint the review I originally wrote about the book of transcripts from Pound's Nazi-era radio speeches, Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War Two, edited by Yale professor Leonard Doob. My hope is that the information below will have you thinking twice about Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young's decision here to so prominently feature Pound's work in this anthology, and that you too will in the future no longer passively put up with these kinds of post-war apologetics for a man who spent a decade of his life passionately and publicly arguing for the violent genocide of the Jewish race.]
2021 reads, #77. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth.
Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him.
American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive.
It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all.
It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing."
It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less.
Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced.
2021 reads, #77. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth.
Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him.
American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive.
It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all.
It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing."
It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less.
Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced.
December 24, 2019
You know you're in trouble with a poetry book when the introduction is much more interesting than the actual poems presented. And can we unite as a nation to pass a law making it illegal to publish an introduction more than 10 pages long? Is that too much to ask?
Introduction about the turbulent 90-year history of the magazine aside, you can't help but wonder how the magazine managed to stay afloat. 90% of this supposed "best of" anthology is absolute crap, forgettable ten seconds after you read it. There are also some parodies, but you need to be familiar with famous poets and poems in order to at least yawn at the joke. For example, if you do not know which poem is being poked fun of in "Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright" than you may as well not crack open this book at all.
Lots of yawners here on love, death and landscape. Only one from Charles Bukowski and a small handful from ee cummings. I gave this an extra star because it introduced me to the poems of Billy Collins (not to be confused with Scottish Billy Connolly, who is arguably a better poet than most of the folks presented here.)
Introduction about the turbulent 90-year history of the magazine aside, you can't help but wonder how the magazine managed to stay afloat. 90% of this supposed "best of" anthology is absolute crap, forgettable ten seconds after you read it. There are also some parodies, but you need to be familiar with famous poets and poems in order to at least yawn at the joke. For example, if you do not know which poem is being poked fun of in "Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright" than you may as well not crack open this book at all.
Lots of yawners here on love, death and landscape. Only one from Charles Bukowski and a small handful from ee cummings. I gave this an extra star because it introduced me to the poems of Billy Collins (not to be confused with Scottish Billy Connolly, who is arguably a better poet than most of the folks presented here.)
July 12, 2025
I especially liked Wendell Berry's "Dust", though it reminded me of Carl Sagan. This was a solid collection, not particularly memorable but thorough and strongly organized.
June 3, 2012
Return of the Goddess Artemis
Under your Milky Way
And slow-revolving Bear,
Frogs from the alder thicket pray
In terror of your judgment day,
Loud with repentance there.
The log they crowned as king
Grew sodden, lurched and sank:
An owl floats by on silent wing,
Dark water bubbles from the spring;
They invoke you from each bank.
At dawn you shall appear,
A gaunt red-legged crane,
You whom they know too well for fear,
Lunging your beak down like a spear
To fetch them home again.
Robert Graves,
POETRY magazine, October 1947
This is apparently from La Fontaine’s “The Frogs who desired a Kingˮ (Book 3, number IV of La Fontaine’s first volume of Fables [1668]) which is in turn from Phaedrus’s versification of the Aesopic tales (“The Frogs asking for a King” Book 1, number II of The Fables of Phaedrus [circa 45 CE].
How or why Graves places Artemis here, I can’t say; I’d guess it’s just Graves. In both La Fontaine and Phaedrus this is an explicitly political fable; in Phaedrus the moral Aesop gives (in the Henry Thomas Riley translation) is:
“Do you also, O fellow-citizens,” said Æsop, “submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.”
La Fontaine has (in Elizur Wright’s translation):
“With this now make yourselves content,
Lest for your sins a worse be sent.”
The poem here is from p. 143 of the Anthology. Characteristic of the volume is that the following verse begins “A toad the power mower caught…” (The Death of a Toad, Richard Wilbur, 1948) This habit seems clever at best.
July 26, 2008
i chose this as my poetry anthology for my creative writing workshop. and from what i can tell, it is the best poetry anthology i have yet owned. a truly stunning collection -- a must have for serious poetry lovers.
December 22, 2007
I love this book. I like to open it at random and read from it. Its very inspirational and has all my favorite contempory poets.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews