The Top 500 Poems

The Top 500 Poems offers a vivid portrait of poetry in English, reproducing the most anthologized poems as tracked by the leading resource, the Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry Online. Chosen by critics, editors, poets, and general readers, these works speak across centuries, beginning with Chaucer’s resourceful inventions and moving through Shakespeare’s masterpieces, John Donne’s complex originality, and Alexander Pope’s mordant satires. The anthology also features perennial favorites such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats; Emily Dickinson’s prisms of profundity; the ironies of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot; and the passion of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. These 500 poems are verses that readers either already know or will want to know, encapsulating the visceral power of truly great literature. William Harmon provides illuminating commentary to each work and a rich introduction that ties the entire collection together.