The Top 500 Poems: A Columbia Anthology.

Anthologies are indelibly marked by the time of their compilation. The most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for instance, adds selections from the writings of Dame Julian of Norwich, thus recording the developments of the past decade in scholarship, criticism, and classroom practice. Designed for the bedside table rather than the seminar room, William Harmon's new anthology, The Top 500 Poems, captures the ethos of the 1990s at least as effectively as the products of scholarly consensus. No interest groups or theoretical trends can affect a selection made by statistical analysis: these 500 poems, from "Summer is icumen in" to Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," have earned their place by appearing more frequently in other anthologies (according to The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry, 9th edition), than any other poems in English!

Harmon remarks in his introduction that "these 500 poems, with a bit of commentary, will serve as a splendid way lot somebody to become acquainted with the best that has been written in the shorter poetic forms for about 750 years. As I have said to myself repeatedly, this is it! .... All right!" we shout in response, exchanging high fives in celebration of the inclusion of our favorites--"Kubla Khan," "Jabberwocky," "The Road Not Taken," "To Autumn:' and "Annabel Lee"--now that's a Dream Team! Only in the age of computerized databases and instantaneous word searches could the task of editing be so blithely abandoned, My main regret is that William Harmon does not carry out his idea more boldly.

Depending so completely on familiarity, a volume such as The Top 500 Poems can promise no surprises. Turning to the selection of poems by Robert Herrick, for instance, readers encounter exactly the poems they expect. Perhaps it is reassuring to think that a new reader of poetry will also cast her eyes upon Julia's clothes. But the very premise of the book guarantees us that this reader would have found "that liquefaction of her clothes" in every other existing anthology of English poetry (or at least in those indexed by Granger 's). Thus, the organizing premise of the anthology also renders it superfluous.

Although Harmon's true models are lists, such as The Fortune 500 and "American Top 40," he imitates the sources of his data and presents the poems in chronological order. Too bad! Wouldn't it be a lot more fun to open the book to poem No. 500, Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Luke Havergal," to turn the pages through the ever-more-popular, delighting at once in the juxtapositions and the contests, as Yeats's "Easter, 1916" takes the lead, by a hair's breadth, over Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"--both to be edged out (wow!) by Kipling's "Recessional"? Harmon chooses the "story of poetry" over the drama of the countdown, which would move inexorably toward the top ten and Blake's "Tiger"--the No. 1 poem!

The benefit of the statistical method of selection lies in the inclusion of old chestnuts that have not been collected recently, though they have been collected many times. The nineteenth-century American poets are here, including Longfellow and Whittier, not only Whitman and Dickinson. Of course, an editor not bound to the value of quantity might choose to include these old-fashioned poems, as he might choose others, forgotten by his fellow-anthologists, or only recently discovered. Harmon does not let the tally dictate his every move; he prints both versions of Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a fine decision. On the other hand, he puts the opening lines of "The General Prologue" to The Canterbut), Tales in a "rough-and-ready" modernization, despite the/act that these very lines in Middle English may be more frequently committed to memory than any others in the language. While I applaud the attempt to make it more accessible, Harmon's modernization rains Chaucer's poetry. A 1ongish note of paraphrase would have done the trick!

The remarks Harmon makes after each poem, providing that necessary "bit of commentary," range in their usefulness from most illuminating to peculiarly extraneous. Most helpful, and truest to the idea of the book, are those notes directing readers to other poems related in genre, mode, form, theme, or topic. Notes to older poems often include discrete glosses of hard, or deceptively familiar words. This strategy allows Harmon to convey information without deforming his texts with footnote markers. Given that the aim seems to be to aid readers, a little more detail would have been useful in certain cases. For instance, many readers won't recognize the people to whom Pope and Johnson refer in their poems. Having chosen to provide less rather than more, however, Harmon can only be criticized when he opts for the quirky or insubstantial over the informative. I think most readers of Blake's "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time" would find it more helpful to know that the poem refers to the legendary visit of Christ to England, than that Blake's lines "furnished the movie title Chariots of Fire." Perhaps more disappointing are those notes that seem to exist only because uniformity demands that all the poems have notes beneath them. The interesting quatrain or fragment, "Western Wind" (oddly punctuated to isolate the second line from the first), elicits only a remark as to its antiquity (debatable) and its use, as a title of another anthology (irrelevant). Having nothing to say about a poem betrays the inherent weakness of the principle of selection, or rather, election.

The Top 500 Poems is a handsome book, made with decent paper, unlike the phyllo-dough sheets of other anthologies. Each poem occupies its own page, or pages. Some readers will rejoice that there's nary a newfangled entry to challenge or confuse; some will wonder what has really been written in the latter part of our own century. Some of the very oldest anthologies of poetry in English collected poems mourning the deaths of sovereigns; Harmon has made his volume accidentally elegiac. This is what poetry in English was, he says, for other people told us so.