The Best Poems of the English Language
from Chaucer through Robert Frost
chosen and introduced by Harold Bloom · 2004
The poems are old enough to belong to everyone.
The anthology is not. Which poems, in what order, under which
headings — and every word of the introductions and the glosses in the
margin — are Harold Bloom’s work, and that selection and arrangement is
his even where the verse inside it is public domain.
Made from a hard copy we own, for one reader. Not to be passed on or
linked to.
Recordings, where a poem has one, are public-domain readings from
LibriVox and elsewhere, and some are read by Darryl Sterk.
Where a recording follows the lines, a machine was asked only where in
the sound each line of the poem falls — nothing was transcribed and
nothing was translated by one.
The Chinese under the lines, where a poem has it, is ours and is written
by hand. It is a crib and not a translation: flat, literal, and meant to
be read across from the English line above it.
Thirteen poems are not Bloom’s choice. They are here because there is a
recording of them in the house, and every one of them says so on its own
page. Five poets come in with them who are not in the book at all —
Thomas Moore, John Boyle O’Reilly, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash and
Gwendolyn Brooks — placed among his poets by their dates. The notes
under those five names are ours, not his.
Three of the thirteen are still in copyright: Parker’s The Very Rich
Man, Nash’s The Purist and Brooks’s The Bean Eaters,
four, ten and eleven lines long. They stand here on the same footing as
everything else — one reader, one hard copy, no link given out.