Poetry by the Numbers

...This unfashionable approach contrasts with the main current of 20th-century criticism, which considers literary tastes mutable—as we know from the unremitting academic wars over the canon...

...Radicals argue that the valuation of one work over another is so culturally conditioned, it is no more significant than the length of this year's hemlines, or the width of neckties...

...The revolutionary volume offers two ways to trace "the story of poetry in English...

...Although a quasi-scientific selection process may be a first, the book's underlying concept is decidedly retro...

...JL ARMON evidently conceives his role to be that of a host anxious to create a convivial atmosphere for his feast of poetry...

...a discriminating purchaser will surely reply: "No it ain't...

...And that's not all...

...John Keats —downgraded by neometaphysical critics—is similarly acclaimed today because his odes elucidate current favorites from John Ashbery to Mary Oliver...

...What is worse, it offers flag-waving war-horses like John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" (" 'Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,/ But spare your country's flag,' she said") or Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," while limiting Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope to a few token verses...

...A few clunkers no one enjoys, however, have sneaked into Columbia's number-crunching enterprise...

...Thus it was predictable that some publisher, armed with a computer, would dream up a book like The Top 500 Poems (Columbia University Press, 1,132 pp., $29.95...

...Richard Crashaw is excluded, yet there is room for such lightweight fare as Leigh Hunt's "Jenny Kissed Me" or Carl Sandburg's "The fog comes/on little cat feet...

...The Top 500 Poems has precisely the opposite effect...

...Harmon nurtures a penchant for ranking art, with or without statistics to back him up...

...Before long we begin to feel trapped at some mixer where the gabby chaperon won't shut up and simply let the guests enjoy themselves...

...Almost three-fifths of the book is drawn from the last two centuries, primarily between the 1820s and the 1930s...

...Under this system, too, Modernist touchstones like Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," T.S...

...it upstages it...

...How about a comparison of Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (369) with Carroll's "How Doth the Little Crocodile" (370...

...I wrote the 'Purple Cow'?I'm sorry, now, I Wrote it!/But I can Tell you, Anyhow,/I'll Kill you if you Quote it...

...He repeatedly breaks in to bombard the reader with trivia: Sir John Suckling is credited with the invention of crib-bage...

...For many of the 400 collections forming the statistical base obviously were American anthologies, and they always contain representative examples of Puritan and Colonial verse...

...best-selling novelist Tom Clancy quotes aline from Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" in The Sum of All Fears...

...Its editor, Francis Turner Palgrave, aimed to include "all the best Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language...

...It gives short shrift to the Elizabethans, omits several noteworthy 17th-century figures, and pares the neoclassical poets down to eight...

...The anthology as a comprehensive repository for Deathless Verse appears to have originated with the 1861 publication of The Golden Treasury...

...Harmon likes the sound of this phrase so much, he uses it as the title to his introduction...

...This kind of commentary doesn't support the work...

...Palgrave had eschewed chronology...

...No wonder Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St...

...One may peruse the verses chronologically (their printed order), going from the 13th-century song "Sumer is icumen in" to Sylvia Plath's "Daddy...

...nevertheless, she heightens our feel for the tenor of an age...

...Its mechanical selection process and obtrusive hype reduce its offerings to cultural icons...

...In clearheaded moments, most will acknowledge that figures can be manipulated to prove practically anything...

...Subsequent anthologists decided to include more writers of primarily historical interest...

...Whatever his audience, Harmon patronizes it: "Rhyme, let us not forget, is much better at accenting difference and tension than is alliteration, which gives mostly the effect of sliding along the slippery slope of selfsame sounds...

...And lest we lose sight of poetry being Just Like Life, we are told at the conclusion of an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem whose eponymous hero commits suicide: "You can probably read an obituary for a Richard Cory in a local newspaper within the next twelve-month...

...As a poet, teacher, editor and father, I am satisfied that these [works], with a bit of commentary, will serve as a splendid way for someone to become acquainted with the best that has been written in the shorter poetic forms for about 750 years...

...But confront us with percentages indicating that oat bran helps us live longer, or a pie chart demonstrating a product's appeal, and credulity bounces back...

...Eliot's "Little Gidding," and Archibald MacLeish's "The End of the World" rub shoulders with Ge-lett Burgess' notorious ditty, "The Purple Cow"—not to mention its cautionary sequel: "Ah, yes...

...As with the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Sunflowers, we can no longer appreciate them for their own merits...

...he organized thematically and sought to achieve a sense of timelessness, minimizing nuances of style and era...

...Robert Burns'" engaging face can still be seen on cigar boxes and shortbread tins" in Scotland...

...A Baedeker's Guide to poetry's monuments was the quintessential Victorian ideal...

...Its clones would probably fill a large library...

...or one may follow a popularity list based on frequency of appearance in those 400 anthologies (provided in an appendix), beginning with William Blake's "The Tiger" and finishing with Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Luke Havergal...

...Certain minor poems are endlessly reprinted because people love them...

...This formula proved popular enough to keep the book in print through the present day...

...Increasingly, people tend to distrust the experts...

...Whichever method we elect, Harmon certifies, we will be getting the real McCoy...

...Never mind that the last named appears in this book only in a crude, "rough-and-ready translation...

...A second anomaly in The Top 500 Poems stands out as well...

...This, they say, explains why John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins—neither of whom were esteemed by the Victorians—gained in popular stature when they were found to illuminate T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden...

...A good editor can provide a context for a poem new to his readers and make them appreciate something rich and strange...

...For all its postured objectivity and claims to encompass only the greatest poetry ever written, Columbia's anthology displays as much bias as any collection...

...Apparently the computer mix also included children's treasuries, and these combine the widest possible range of styles and forms...

...Shakespeare is "the greatest," followed by Milton and Chaucer...

...Probably most of us were introduced to much of the verse we know through anthologies...

...As a result, Anne Bradstreet, Philip Freneau and Edward Taylor, the best of a colorless lot, turn up like bad pennies...

...A figure like Aphra Behn may seem less "immortal" than John Dryden, or even Lord Rochester...

...Tastes, of course, have shifted somewhat...

...We might suppose from all this emoting that younger readers are the target audience—until we come upon the gloss mentioning Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, or the note on Oliver Goldsmith's "When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly" that discusses parodic lyrics in Thomas Pynchon...

...His excitement at the idea froths over into the manic spiel of a D. J. introducing the Pop Chart from Parnassus: "As I have said to myself repeatedly, this is it...

...Rarely would you find Eugene Field (" Wynken, Blynken and Nod") in a collection otherwise filled with the likes of Emily Bronte and Robert Lowell...

...These are the poems that have risen to the top in that multiple selection process—the creme de la creme...

...instead, they find safety in numbers...

...Think of what insights could be gleaned by pondering Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (168) alongside Walt Whitman's " A Noiseless Patient Spider" (169...

...To Harmon's inflated claim that "this is it...

...Columbia, the dust jacket proudly explains, has developed a compilation method that far transcends mere personal opinion...

...by writers not living—and none but the best...

...Is there not something heroic about [Edward Lear's] Jumblies] pluck as they sail out in bad weather in an unfit vessel...

...Moderates contend that we admire the bards of the past who help us better understand the contemporaries we read...

...Lewis Carroll's " Jabberwocky" (from Through the Looking-Glass) weighs in at 18, its fabulous monster burbling just ahead of the "rough beast" in "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats...

...Nicholas" ranks 204 on the popularity list, between Robert Burns' "To a Mouse" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Snow-Storm...

...William Harmon, who is listed as editor, in essence contributed an enthusiastic introductory essay, single-paragraph biographical sketches of the authors presented, and many notes...

...His particular selections from Blake, for example, sound as if they might have been written by Elizabethans—whose lyrics, in turn, evoke Byron and Shelley...

...Were one actually to take up Harmon's rash suggestion and read the poems in order of popularity, the bizarre juxtapositions might well create a new critical school...

...Unfortunately, these important eras of our history were shortchanged by the lyric art...

...Eventually, though, compilers began to notice that certain works their forebears found enchanting made the younger generation snicker, while hitherto unrecognized voices were drawing crowds...

...Overexposure has rendered them all—good, bad and mediocre—stereotypes to our jaded sensibilities...

...Harmon enthuses...

...Hence this collection of "the poems that have appealed most often to 400 contemporary editors, critics and poets for in-clusionin their own widely disparate anthologies, which were indexed in the Ninth Edition of the classic reference, The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry...