Review: The Harper Anthology of Poetry

To my mind The Harper Anthology of Poetry, published in 1981, remains the best of the mainstream academic anthologies of poetry in English. The taste of the anthologist, John Frederick Nims, is thoroughly conventional: this is very much a "canonical" anthology, though since the canon is the academic literary canon of half a century ago, it does not reflect the efforts by more recent anthologists to make that canon more diverse. The collection does though occasionally include some worthy lesser known poems for variety. The time range covered is from the 13th century, the earliest point at which English poetry becomes intelligible to a modern reader, although needing extensive glosses, to the 1970s. The resultant lack of poetry written since then may be considered a minus by readers who, unlike myself, feel that much poetry worth reading has been published in English since then.

Where this anthology really excels is in its ancillary materials: the extensive footnotes are judicious, clear, and of relevance and use to the non-specialist, and the long appendix on prosody -- meter, rhyme, free verse, and other technical topics -- is the best guide to the subject for the general reader which I have read.

All in all, I would recommend this book as the best single mainstream comprehensive academic anthology of English language poetry, provided the reader doesn't mind the lack of features found in more recent anthologies as mentioned above. The book seems to be long out of print, but copies are readily available used.