From Publishers Weekly
Bloom made his critical reputation with a book called The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that poetry proceeds on the misreadings by strong poets of their predecessors. In this massive anthology, Bloom's strongly held, and deeply felt, preferences for the most productive misreadings in the language come to the fore brilliantly. Bloom has developed his tastes over a lifetime and specifically casts this book as their summation—"the anthology I've always wanted to possess." An introduction entitled "The Art of Reading Poetry" tries to help nonexpert readers hear what Bloom hears, explaining that "poetic power... so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes" and naming poetry "the true mode for expanding our consciousness." While the selections that follow are significant, many are predictable; it is the headnotes that make the book indispensable. The heart of the book, of course, is its choice of poems, most rightly well-known, some (from Jones Very to Conrad Aiken) famous in their time, but now obscure: despite his title, Bloom ends not with Frost but with Hart Crane, whose visionary rhapsodies encapsulate, for him, modern poetry's powers. Popular favorites (Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling) also make the cut, as does the 17th-century "Tom O'Bedlam's Song," which Bloom calls "the most magnificent Anonymous poem in the language." The book is filled with hundreds of taste-making turns and asides; it's hard, no matter where one's affiliations lie, not to love Bloom's offhand demolition of T.S. Eliot's essay on Andrew Marvell. Whether one chooses to adopt Bloom's stances or fortify against them, this is sure to be a formative book for experienced readers and neophytes alike. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Bloom has assembled selections from 108 British and American poets from Chaucer through Frost. In his cogent and lively introductory essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry"–itself ample reason for reading this volume–the editor says that he selected the poems for "their aesthetic standards" in "reaching the high and ancient art" of poetry that fulfills "man's quest for the transcendental and extraordinary." And what a transcendent journey this is. Both predictable and unexpected titles appear, with particular emphasis on many of the Romanticists, and from these Bloom offers 24 poets' pieces in some detail. Serious students will reap a fruitful harvest from his frequent annotations, presented as commentary before the selected pieces. His freshness of thought shines through in these remarks; even poets like Shakespeare, about whose works so much has been written, resonate anew. Students will appreciate not only the poems, but also the insights into the high art they represent.–Margaret Nolan, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Literary lion Bloom's earliest books, reaching back to 1959, examine the work of Shelley, Blake, and Yeats, poets that now figure prominently in his latest prescription for good reading, a massive collection of the best of 108 British and American poets writing in English from Chaucer through Robert Frost. Declaring poetry a "high and ancient art," and discussing its figurative and allusive elements in an instructive essay titled "The Art of Reading Poetry," Bloom analyzes the aesthetics of poetry and what poetry does for us and explains what he believes makes one poem better than another. He also provides illuminating assessments of each poet (Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Stevenson) and freely concedes what some will condemn, his inclusion of very few twentieth-century poets and evasion of "extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies." However one feels about Bloom's focus, every serious reader of poetry really must begin with the works he so ardently loves and champions (he confesses to reciting Tennyson's "Ulysses" when he is feeling blue), and this comprehensive anthology is an ideal starting place. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description

The Best Poems of the English Language is the culmination for Harold Bloom of his lifelong love of poetry. It is a comprehensive anthology that offers the reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry.

The vast scope of this anthology begins with Chaucer and ends with poets whose births predate 1900. Bloom has culled his selection according to his three absolute criteria: aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom.

Featured in this volume is a substantial and significant introductory essay called "The Art of Reading Poetry." This essay presents Bloom's critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves best, and conveys his passionate concern for how a poem should be interpreted and appreciated. Throughout this anthology, Bloom includes extensive introductions to each poet and to many of the individual poems. In such commentaries, Bloom guides the reader through what is most relevant for a true understanding of the more than one hundred poets selected. The Best Poems of the English Language is regarded by Harold Bloom as his most significant meditation upon all those poets in English who have formed his mind. Here in one volume is an abundance that can never be exhausted.

About the Author
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than twenty-five books include Genius; How to Read and Why; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; The Western Canon; The Book of J; and The Anxiety of Influence. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Best Poems of the English Language is a comprehensive anthology that offers the reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry." "The vast scope of this anthology begins with Chaucer and ends with poets whose births predate 1900. Harold Bloom has culled his selection according to his three absolute criteria: aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom." Featured in this volume is a substantial and significant introductory essay called "The Art of Reading Poetry." This essay presents Bloom's critical reflections on more than a half century devoted to reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves best, and conveys his passionate concern for how a poem should be interpreted and appreciated. Throughout this anthology, Bloom includes extensive introductions to each poet and to many of the individual poems. In such commentaries, Bloom guides the reader through what is most relevant for a true understanding of the more than one hundred poets selected.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Bloom made his critical reputation with a book called The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that poetry proceeds on the misreadings by strong poets of their predecessors. In this massive anthology, Bloom's strongly held, and deeply felt, preferences for the most productive misreadings in the language come to the fore brilliantly. Bloom has developed his tastes over a lifetime and specifically casts this book as their summation-"the anthology I've always wanted to possess." An introduction entitled "The Art of Reading Poetry" tries to help nonexpert readers hear what Bloom hears, explaining that "poetic power... so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes" and naming poetry "the true mode for expanding our consciousness." While the selections that follow are significant, many are predictable; it is the headnotes that make the book indispensable. The heart of the book, of course, is its choice of poems, most rightly well-known, some (from Jones Very to Conrad Aiken) famous in their time, but now obscure: despite his title, Bloom ends not with Frost but with Hart Crane, whose visionary rhapsodies encapsulate, for him, modern poetry's powers. Popular favorites (Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling) also make the cut, as does the 17th-century "Tom O'Bedlam's Song," which Bloom calls "the most magnificent Anonymous poem in the language." The book is filled with hundreds of taste-making turns and asides; it's hard, no matter where one's affiliations lie, not to love Bloom's offhand demolition of T.S. Eliot's essay on Andrew Marvell. Whether one chooses to adopt Bloom's stances or fortify against them, this is sure to be a formative book for experienced readers and neophytes alike. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The flat assertion of its title aside, this weighty collection represents the personal taste of the irascibly conservative Bloom (How To Read and Why), who, in this age of "extrapoetic considerations," champions "the splendor of figurative language," "cognitive power," and allusiveness as the core values of poetic mastery. Certainly, few would dismiss his examples: works by Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot, and Stevens, the staples of college textbooks and innumerable anthologies. Arranged chronologically by author, the poems are preceded by commentaries that extol their specific virtues and place them in historical context. Taken together, they provide an overview of Bloom's own theories of writing, such as his notion that the greatest poems manifest an "inevitability" of phrasing. An eccentric editor (offering only four pages of George Herbert's hard radiance while granting an inexplicable 20 to Lewis Carroll's charming nonsense), sometimes exasperating in his smugness, Bloom rarely bores, and at his best he achieves a cogency ("poetry brings its own past alive into its present") worthy of the poets he so deeply admires.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal