title: The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
author:  Harold Bloom 
description: Bloom made his critical reputation with a book called The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that poetry proceeds on the misreadings by strong poets of their predecessors. In this massive anthology, Bloom's strongly held, and deeply felt, preferences for the most productive misreadings in the language come to the fore brilliantly. Bloom has developed his tastes over a lifetime and specifically casts this book as their summation"the anthology I've always wanted to possess." An introduction entitled "The Art of Reading Poetry" tries to help nonexpert readers hear what Bloom hears, explaining that "poetic power... so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes" and naming poetry "the true mode for expanding our consciousness." While the selections that follow are significant, many are predictable; it is the headnotes that make the book indispensable. The heart of the book, of course, is its choice of poems, most rightly well-known, some (from Jones Very to Conrad Aiken) famous in their time, but now obscure: despite his title, Bloom ends not with Frost but with Hart Crane, whose visionary rhapsodies encapsulate, for him, modern poetry's powers. Popular favorites (Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling) also make the cut, as does the 17th-century "Tom O'Bedlam's Song," which Bloom calls "the most magnificent Anonymous poem in the language." The book is filled with hundreds of taste-making turns and asides; it's hard, no matter where one's affiliations lie, not to love Bloom's offhand demolition of T.S. Eliot's essay on Andrew Marvell. Whether one chooses to adopt Bloom's stances or fortify against them, this is sure to be a formative book for experienced readers and neophytes alike. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: ALSO BY HAROLD BLOOM
  
   _Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism_
  
   _Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind_
  
   _Iago: The Strategies of Evil_
  
   _Lear: The Great Image of Authority_
  
   _Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air_
  
   _Falstaff: Give Me Life_
  
   _The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime_
  
   _The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible_
  
   _The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life_
  
   _Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems_
  
   _Fallen Angels_
  
   _American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom_
  
   _Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine_
  
   _Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?_
  
   _The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost_
  
   _Hamlet: Poem Unlimited_
  
   _Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds_
  
   _Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages_
  
   _How to Read and Why_
  
   _Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human_
  
  _Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Re