Forgotten Books: The Best-Loved Poems of the American People - Selected by Hazel Felleman
This is another book from my childhood. As far back as I can remember, there was a copy on the bookshelves in my parents' house, although I think it actually may have belonged to my sister. Whoever it belonged to, I spent a lot of time reading it when I was a kid. The original edition was published in 1936; I believe the edition we had was newer than that. I know it had the same dust jacket as in the picture, because I remember it. It was just about that beat up, too.
THE BEST-LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE had a lot of classic 19th Century poetry in it. The more recent poems tended toward the sentimental. To be honest, I remember very little of it, despite the hours I spent reading it. It didn't turn me into a poetry fan, either. To this day, I don't read much along those lines. But looking up images of this volume definitely made me feel nostalgic, although it's no SCUPPERS THE SAILOR DOG.
5 comments:
From grade school through college I read a lot of poetry and wrote it, too. I don't know when I dropped away from it, but I read very little now. That's kind of a shame.
I've seen this and I think I probably read some of it back in the day. Don't remember much about it though.
Same here, vaguely remember it from my parents - or was it my Aunt's? - house, surely paged through it, found some striking imagery. I read poetry to this day, though not often and usually from the same couple of shelves of volumes, all the usual suspects: Tennyson, Keats, Shelly, Hawthorne, Frost, Longfellow Hughes and so on.
I read and collect several little magazines that print poetry. I'm no expert but I do like Philip Larkin a lot. The literary quarterlies I subscribe to have some interesting new poetry: Hudson Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, etc.
I rarely will pick up an issue of POETRY or AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, but the little magazine that had the most poetry to my taste had been ONTARIO REVIEW, alas RIP with its editor. William Stafford is among my favorites...not too controversial (at least not for his poetry as opposed to his pacifism), but from the period where poets needed to Do Something Else, for the most part, to become famous outside poetry circles, whether we speak of James Dickey or Maya Angelou or Katha Pollitt or Audre Lorde.
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