Strong Opinions
The Best Poems of the English Language? Who could resist opening an anthology so named to see what's in it? Especially when it has the name of Harold Bloom on the front cover. It's typical of this giant of a critic's eternal self-confidence, of course, that he should name his selection the Best Poems. He begins with Chaucer, born around 1343, and ends with Hart Crane, born in 1899, and admits that by setting the latter limit, he is evading the difficult task of choosing the Best Poems by poets born in the twentieth century. Into his chronological net fall 108 poets (aside from Anonymous), with 24 given "in something like their full abundance." The 24 include poets that Bloom has always championed: Shakespeare, Milton, the major Romantic poets, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Hart Crane. No anthology is without its critics over who is in and who is out. Such quarrels are par for the course. Bloom himself throws down the gauntlet in the first words of ...