"I counted all the poems."

July 29, 2017 10:44 AM

Emily Temple has surveyed general poetry anthologies for English-speaking readers to find the poems most anthologized over the last twenty-five years.
posted by mixedmetaphors (14 comments total)

ctrl-F "The Cathedral Is"

0 results

happy sigh
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:19 AM on July 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

so much depends
upon

this one single
poem

set in type,
printed

inside your new
textbook
posted by The Situationist Room with Guy Debord at 12:43 PM on July 29, 2017 [6 favorites]

My predictions before looking at the article:

"This is just to say"
"Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
"My Last Duchess"
"Museé des Beaux Arts"
"In a Station of the Metro"
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:03 PM on July 29, 2017

*checks article*

Yup
Yup
Yup
Yup
Yup

Source: teaching English Lit for 15 years and receiving countless desk copies of anthologies with the same damn poems in them every year
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:08 PM on July 29, 2017 [7 favorites]

It's a bit of apples and oranges in terms of seeing what's anthologized most, as she mixes surveys of poetry from Chaucer on with those of contemporary American poetry. I was surprised to see Shakespeare didn't place in the first five groups until I saw that the anthologies from which she'd drawn would've skewed away from him (and other early English poets) and towards American poets from the 19th and 20th centuries.

I suspect that a comparable survey using only Chaucer-through-20th-century anthologies would yield quite different and more defensible results. I mean, both have their merits, but it's very hard to believe that Yusef Komunyakaa has been anthologized more than John Keats. A statistically significant sampling along those lines might require pushing one terminus back a bit before 1992, but, otherwise, I'm not sure what's being demonstrated.
posted by the sobsister at 1:20 PM on July 29, 2017 [7 favorites]

I called that the first one by a woman would be either by Emily Dickinson, or "One Art"
posted by potrzebie at 1:21 PM on July 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

A good page to bookmark. Thank you.
posted by acrasis at 1:24 PM on July 29, 2017

She has wasted her life
posted by chavenet at 2:00 PM on July 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

20 anthologies - thats all? seriously.... I presume there are more than 20 anthologies published each week...

just seems like a poor sampling
posted by mary8nne at 2:14 PM on July 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

Had the surveyor included more anthologies edited by viewers of 'Archer' then Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib" would have played a stronger role.
posted by mr. digits at 2:16 PM on July 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

No Thom Gunn, really? Not even "The Man with Night Sweats", "The Hug" or "My Sad Captains"? Well there they are.
posted by informavore at 4:21 PM on July 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 5:04 PM on July 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've read far more proportionately of 3, 4, and 5 than 6-11.
posted by jamjam at 5:28 PM on July 29, 2017

I think I taught about 1/4th of these.
posted by doctornemo at 8:44 AM on July 30, 2017