City Desk: Standing Out

Of comprehensive poetry anthologies there is no shortage; to break successfully into this market one is well advised to offer a brand name. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost (HarperCollins, 972 pp., $34.95) offers one of the toniest brand names in the business: The poems were selected by critic-celebrity Harold Bloom, who also offers detailed commentary on the selections. “In authentic poetry,” he writes, “an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness.” The purpose of art, Ezra Pound instructed us, is to “make it new”; Bloom suggests that poetry reaches greatness to the precise extent that it makes the new creation appear to have been inevitable. Through its “strangeness,” he writes, great poetry “is the true mode for expanding our consciousness.” of the ENGLISH

LANGUAGE BLOOM

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Of comprehensive poetry anthologies there is no shortage; to break successfully into this market one is well advised to offer a brand name. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost (HarperCollins, 972 pp., $34.95) offers one of the toniest brand names in the business: The poems were selected by critic-celebrity Harold Bloom, who also offers detailed commentary on the selections. “In authentic poetry,” he writes, “an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness.” The purpose of art, Ezra Pound instructed us, is to “make it new”; Bloom suggests that poetry reaches greatness to the precise extent that it makes the new creation appear to have been inevitable. Through its “strangeness,” he writes, great poetry “is the true mode for expanding our consciousness.” of the ENGLISH

LANGUAGE BLOOM