* Louis Untermeyer, A Concise Treasure of American Poetry (Pocket Books). A peerless one-volume introduction to American poetry. Untermeyer’s biographical notes and comments are exemplary. See the note on William Cullen Bryant.
* The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen (Grove Press). In the 1960s battle of the anthologies, Allen’s — which represented the counter-cultural, adversarial, and avant-garde alternatives to the academic poetry of the time — won readers’ hearts and minds and gained legitimacy for the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School.
* The Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. This attractive but sadly out-of-print five-volume set is a nostalgic lit major’s dream, covering English poetry from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through the Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians. Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, and I compared notes and discovered that both of us go to book sales and snap up a copy of any volume to give as presents.
* Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies (Da Capo). This superbly entertaining book contains monuments of merriment by Max Beerbohm, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Lewis Carroll — as well as an inadvertent self-parody by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Da Capo Press reissued the book with an introduction by Veronica Geng in 1985: “If Parodies were a man, I’d marry it (him, them).”
* Reading Lyrics, ed Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Pantheon). Whether you consider them as poems or as occupying a field of their own, the best lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Gus Kahn, Leo Robin, and many others amount to an American cultural glory full of wit and romance and charm. This is an indispensable book.
* Harvey Shapiro, Poets of World War II (Library of America). The scariest war of the twentieth century produced memorable poems, some well-known (Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”), some little known or under-appreciated, including works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lincoln Kirstein, Kenneth Koch, and Yvor Winters. This is a very smart anthology edited by the late poet (and former editor of the New York Times Book Review) who flew 35 missions as an Air Force radio gunner in Europe during the war.
* The Oxford Book of American Verse edited by F. O. Matthiessen (1950). Professor Matthiessen’s brilliant introduction and sagacious choices made this the American anthology of record in midcentury, and it still holds up. It served me as a constant resource when I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry in 2006.
Ed. note: A version of this piece appeared in The Week in April 2007.
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