Books in Brief: The Harper Anthology of Poetry

The Harper Anthology of Poetry, edited by John Frederick Nims (Harper & Row, 842 pp., $15). Famed as a poet, teacher, translator, editor of Poetry magazine, great explainer of prosody, Nims has put 15 years of work and a lifetime of experience into making an anthology in which seven hundred selections are gathered—some from first editions and even original manuscripts. Ranging from a.d. 1200 through the modern era, this refreshing collection offers many not-often-anthologized poems by major poets (Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore); good anonymous poems; great poems by minor poets (Greene, Southwell, Dekker, Cowley, Rochester, Emily Bronte, Cleveland’s “Upon the death of Mr. King drowned in the Irish Sea,” Swift’s “Rhapsody” on poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning on male chauvinism in Victorian England, Clough’s “Natura naturans,” James Russell Lowell’s poem about political corruption and the public’s indifference to it, John Davidson’s “A Runnable Stag,” much admired by Eliot); a broader and deeper presentation of American poets (Jones Very, Frederick Tuckerman, Mona Van Duyn, a concrete poem by e. e. cummings, and Andrew Weiman’s phonemic double helix poem). To Nims, poems are good to the degree that while existing as voice alone they can beam the intensities of our nature into the world of words. Their essential qualities are: life, vitality, body-andsoul being. The anthology also contains explanations of poems, prosody notes, and biographical sketches of authors.