| "Spreading the word
about female poets is the impetus behind this anthology of 150 years of
exceptional women's poetry, along with lively profiles of the writers."
--The Washington Post
"Mighty and complex chain of voices...a smart, handy anthology, essential, indeed, to anyone's library."
--Billy Collins
"What
I like most about this book are the commentaries to the poems. I am
certainly delighted that this volume about women poets has been
assembled."
--Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, lecturer and author
"What makes the poets in this book so remarkable is not their gender but their genius."
--Adam Kirsch
"Fine selection, with illuminating notes and background material. This volume is a pleasure to read
and to own."
--Brooke Allen
"Parisi has encapsulated a literary age in a manner worthy of Dr. Johnson."
--Paula Deitz, editor, The Hudson Review
"Unusually useful and pleasurable volume...covers a gratifying stretch of literary and social terrain."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist
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100 Essential Modern Poems by Women
Edited by Joseph Parisi and Kathleen Welton
The greatest poems written in English by women over the past 150 years, memorable masterpieces to read, reread, and enjoy
100 Essential Modern Poems by Women presents memorable masterpieces by great women writers, tracing the evolution of the art in English over the past 150 years. Like the widely praised 100 Essential Modern Poems, this accessible guide is full of wisdom and insights that will delight, engage, and inspire readers—whatever their gender, age or interests. Selected by Joseph Parisi, former longtime editor of Poetry magazine, in collaboration with veteran publishing executive Kathleen Welton, this brilliant collection features such acclaimed artists as Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Maxine Kumin, Audre Lorde, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Kay Ryan, and May Swenson. But the anthology also turns attention again to a number of fine poets once celebrated then unjustly neglected, and includes several contemporary writers whose unusual talents and unique points of view will surprise and stimulate (and amuse) readers meeting them for the first time.
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100 Essential Modern Poems
Edited by Joseph Parisi
The greatest poems written in English over the past century, memorable masterpieces to read, reread, and enjoy
Selected and introduced by Joseph Parisi, this collection of poems brings together the greatest poems of all the classic authors, along with the choicest works by today’s artists in America and abroad. This comprehensive anthology features the poems that have best expressed the spirit of our times and helped create modern culture.
The general introduction to the book and the prefatory remarks to each poet’s work provide authoritative biographical and critical information.
From the introduction:
"From the immense number of excellent poems written over roughly the last one hundred years, a large group of 'semi-finalists' seemed worthy candidates for a collection to be titled 100 Essential Modern Poems. But in the end, after much deliberation, the hundred that emerged as the most valuable fulfill certain basic crtiteria--the three Ms, if you will--superbly well. First, of course, they are modern, in the broadest sense. Second, they are meaningful, they have significant things to say--provacative and profound ideas, wise and frequently witty observations--about the human condition. Finally, they are memorable: what the poets say is expressed in extraordinarily well-chosen words, in striking images and arresting metaphors, turns of phrase that stick--language one not only keeps in mind but takes to heart, and might want to learn (as the idiom has it) by heart."
The 80 poets who appear in the book include:
William Butler Yeats
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
Hilda Doolittle
Robinson Jeffers
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
Rupert Brooke
Siegfried Sassoon
Isaac Rosenberg
Wilfred Owen
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Dorothy Parker
E.E. Cummings
Robert Graves
Hart Crane
Langston Hughes
Ogden Nash
Stevie Smith
Patrick Kavanaugh
Robert Penn Warren
W.H. Auden
Louis MacNeice
Theodore Roethke
Elizabeth Bishop
Karl Shapiro
John Berryman
Randall Jarrell
Dylan Thomas
William Stafford
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Lowell
William Meredith
Howard Nemerov
Richard Wilbur
Philip Larkin
James Dickey
Anthony Hecht
Denise Levertov
Donald Justice
Kenneth Koch
A.R. Ammons
David Wagoner
Allen Ginsberg
James Merrill
Frank O’Hara
W. D. Snodgrass
John Ashbery
Galway Kinnell
W.S. Merwin
James Wright
Philip Levine
Anne Sexton
Thom Gunn
Adrienne Rich
Ted Hughes
Derek Walcott
Geoffrey Hill
Sylvia Plath
Linda Pastan
Mark Strand
Charles Wright
Mary Oliver
C.K. Williams
Charles Simic
Seamus Heaney
Stephen Dunn
Billy Collins
William Matthews
Sharon Olds
Eavan Boland
Kay Ryan
Yusef Komunyakaa
Jane Kenyon
Paul Muldoon
Rita Dove
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