Americans’ Favorite Poems, ed. Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (Norton,                             2000)*****

If you only buy one anthology of popular poetry, buy this one. It is an exceptional collection of 200 of the best liked poems by poets ranging over history from Lao Tzu to Seamus Heany. More than 140 poets are represented, including W.H. Auden, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Rita Dove, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, James Joyce, John Keats, Andrew Marvel, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Czeslaw Milosz, John Milton, Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, Alexander Pushkin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Sandburg, Sappho, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, James Wright, and William Butler Yeats.

This anthology is the result of the Favorite Poem Project, in which over ten thousand Americans responded to U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s request to send in their favorite poems. He conceived this project as a 200th birthday present to the Library of Congress. His idea was to have a broad cross section of Americans choose their favorite poem and explain briefly why (my own response to this project was Robert Frost’s "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening") . From these, a thousand were asked to record them on audio tape and two hundred were asked to record them on video tape (some of these video tapes have already aired on Jim Lehrer’s Newshour on public TV). These tapes will reside in the Library of Congress Archives. You can find out more about this project and view many video clips of people reading their favorite poem by visiting the website http://www.favoritepoem.org/index.html

What makes this collection so special is that you can read a brief description of the person who considered the poem to be their favorite--and why--just before you read each poem. Some of these personal statements are as moving or as enjoyable as the poem which follows. The poems are arranged alphabetically by author, including the author’s birthdate and homeland, and the book includes an index of authors, titles and first lines.