Top
The Poets Laureate Anthology brings together works by all of the poets who have held the office from its inception to the present day. Many of the poems included here are well known. Works such as Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” and Brook’s “We Real Cool” are familiar to most readers, even those who do not typically read poetry. But, alongside the famous poets are many who are more obscure. More intriguing, perhaps, are the works by poets whose names are well known but whose own verse is not.
As a record of poetry, this textbook is groundbreaking, charting the course of American poetry over the last seventy-five years, while being, at the same time, a pleasure to read, full of some of the world's best-known poems and many new surprises. Elizabeth Hun Schmidt has gathered and introduced poems by each of the forty-three poets who have been named our nation's poets laureate since the post (originally called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress) was established in 1937. Poets range from Robert Pinsky, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop to Charles Simic, Billy Collins, and Rita Dove. Schmidt's spirited introductions place the poets and their poems in historical and literary context and shine light on the interesting and often uneasy relationship between politics and art. This is an inviting, monumental collection for everyone's library, containing much of the best poetry written in America over the last century.
The first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.
