I'm not usually taken with Norton anthologies. They have too many footnotes and the biographical information they provide tends to be on the boring side. But I love this anthology. My only qualm with it is that it features William Carlos Williams, but does not include his poem "This is Just to Say." However, I can't think of another anthology that has both "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric." It's an excellent mix of the old and the new.

The text for 20th Century American Poetry at UR. Physically, my Volume One is not looking too well: B+ = beating up book.

Volume Two wasn't discussed until the last week or two of class but I've read a number of these poets, as suggested by Tomaz. Trying to devour it during this summer.

Anthologies are mostly worthless (unless edited by Rothenberg and in a few other cases). I chose this one for my poetry lit course mostly for the price of a new edition and availability of used editions, but also because it includes decent selections of Loy, Riding, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Duncan, Brathwaite, Lorde, Hejinian, and Susan Howe, to go along with the predictable standards. Also, I like the prose excerpts at the back. I'd like to use something more daring, such as Revolution of the Word or volume one of Poems for the Millennium, but for an intro class I'm going to ease in with this one. I tried the Oxford and other anthologies in my intro to creative writing classes, but they all seem more politically-motivated than this one--as far as the less daring, large-print run anthologies go.

Good stuff.

Fantastic collection of poetry and essays from the modern and contemporary eras.

I'm not actually "finished" with this, but I keep it handy and flip through it regularly and I love it.

I haven't looked that hard but the contempory poetry hasn't interested me at all. But the modern collection is good for those who are trying to travel light while retaining access to a variety of poetic voices.

Really impressive packaging, great poems, good commentary.

I think I read half this book in one night on cocaine in an OK Motor Inn. I'll never do that again. But there's no reason to keep you from doing it better. It's a pricy book, about $100, and closer to five weeknights put together. Caveat Emptor!

A good selection as far as I could tell. The footnotes are unobtrusive yet informative. I found the author biographies and introductory essays I read to be well-written and much more interesting than I'm accustomed to finding in these anthologies.

Read this in English 50 taught by Professor Bill Cook. We studied: Dickinson, Whitman, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Kipling, Masters, Sandburg, Millay, Stein, Cummings, Robinson, Frost, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Owen, Eberhart, Jarrell, Lawrence, Jeffers, Williams, H.D., Pound, Crane, Harper, Dunbar, Spencer, McKay, Toomer, Hughes, Cullen, Moore, Bogan, Bishop, W. Stevens, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Roethke, Thomas, Rukeyser, Levertov, Plath, Rich, Lowell, Berryman, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Hayden, Brooks, Randall, Baraka.

I particularly enjoyed poems by Rich, Cummings, and Berryman.