THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Frost, edited by Harold Bloom (HarperCollins, 984 pp., $34.95). Who would have thought the old...
...Most accounts...
...Harold Bloom has now produced The Best Poems of the English Language, a door-stopper anthology of such unneglected classics as Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt," Raleigh's "Answer to Marlowe," Shakespeare's best-known sonnets, Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy," Blake's "The Tyger," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Tennyson's "The Eagle," Browning's "My Last Duchess," Frost's "Design," and Eliot's "The Waste Land...
...Curious opinions decorate this book...
...Now there's a fine pair to stand up for each other...
...Smack in the middle of kind words on Pope's "Epistle to Augustus," Bloom opines that this satirical poem is "as applicable to President George W Bush's repose as it was to George Il's...
...Well, it's a free country, and Bloom is, I suppose, entitled to this kind of proclamation...
...Don't get me wrong: These are some of my favorites, too...
...The Best Poems of the English Language is really two books: unexceptionable examples of verse, and Harold Bloom's commentary on "the visionary" and "strangeness" and "the anxiety of influence...
...We are told that Tennyson, for example, is "the most accomplished artist of all English poets since Milton and Pope...
...Readers will find a collection of comically bland approvals (of Hardy and Robinson and other fine poets—all of whom deserve better) relieved by impenetrable essays on Bloom's favorites (Blake, Shelley, Yeats...
...The book will have two advantages over The Best Poems of the English Language: the same poems, and different prose...
...Did the great Victorian anthologist Francis Palgrave ever lash into Disraeli with such unfair-mindedness...
...In the sordid betrayals, desertions, adulteries, and incests these two poets inflicted on their wives, mistresses, sisters, and other relations—not to mention some really poor judgment about boating—you can't find a better chronicle of the temptations "visionaries" like Shelley are drawn to and ruined by...
...But does he even read his own papal bulls...
...There is occasionally something to admire in the prose annoying these poems...
...Who would have thought the old oracle had so much obviousness in him...
...If you're not inclined toward the sesquipedalian, oregregiously fond of Kabbala or gnosticism or Thulean hermeneutics (I made that last one up), then you'd be better off saving your$34.95 before you find yourself with the sort of headache Bloom claims to get from reading Emily Dickinson...
...For your children in high school, buy any of a dozen other anthologies of standard English verse...
...A few pages later, Browning is "the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics, surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson...
...But wait...
...Bloom's sole witness turns out to be Byron...
...But what could possibly account for eight-and-a-half pages on William Carlos Williams, or eight on Marianne Moore, when Robert Frost is accorded one...
...Len Krisak...
...And then Bloom declares, "Personally all but selfless, invariably benevolent, Shelley was also gentle, urbane, and by most accounts the most lovable of human beings...
...Readers enter Bloom country at their own risk...
...When it comes to fresh discoveries or stimulating reappraisals, there are no surprises in The Best Poems of the English Language—not even in the windy pronunciamentos, great bags of vatic gas, and gusts of willfully obscure diction with which Bloom fills his introductions to the poets in this anthology...
...But even Bloom's courageous struggle against nonaesthetic principles of literary judgment in today's academy fall victim to his enthusiasms when the afflatus is upon him...
...John Ashbery is "the greatest living American poet...
...But do we really need all this help to remind us of them...
...Bloom thinks the Oxfordians were "lunatic legions," so he can't be all nutty, and his denunciations of modern poetry's School of Resentment deserve endless praise...
Vol. 9 • April 2004 • No. 29
