The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry by Christopher Burns (PDF)

Description

Now with touch screen navigation for Kindle Fire and iPad. The best collection of English and American classics — new and old. A perfect introduction for those new to poetry, as well as a great selection of old favorites for poetry lovers everywhere. Release 3.2 with fully interactive Kindle contents and expanded index. Readers can link from any poem to other poems by the same author, and from the author index back to any poem. From Geoffrey Chaucer to e.e. cummings, from William Shakespeare to Anne Sexton, here are the great American and British poems of the last 500 years, organized by subject in a new and provocative way. “Great Poetry is personal,” writes Christopher Burns in his introduction to this extraordinary collection. “Like a seashell held to your ear, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart. The poet brings the words, you bring your life, and together you make the song.”Poets as diverse as Tennyson and Teasdale echo the themes of “Western Wind” hundreds of years apart. Maya Angelou and Janet Flanders, like talk show hosts sitting on stools, swap stories about their mothers. Robert Browning and Richard Wilbur, separated by more than a century, talk about the way men look at women. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg describe the America each has found. Here are the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg, often ignored in the last few years, along with the masterpieces of William Butler Yeats, e. e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Denise Levertov and Langston Hughes. Some of the poems are funny, others are sad, but all are unforgettable. Great poetry transcends the boundaries of place, time, gender, and race. Although there was no intention to be representative, half the poems were written by Americans and half by English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Canadian poets. And this anthology is modern: a third of the poems were written in the last fifty years and a third were written between 1900 and 1945. The poems are organized to follow the contours of life: the loneliness of the artist, the uses of war, the role of nature, the constancy of love, and the coming on of death. And like all great poems, they are about you. As you read them, be prepared to hear your own heart roaring in your ear.Poets represented by more than one poem include: John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, John Berryman, William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll. Mary Coleridge, e. e. cummings, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot, Mari Evans, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Robinson Jeffers, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Etheridge Knight, D. H. Lawrence, Denise Levertov, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, Claude McKay, W.S. Merwin, Charlotte Mew, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Mlton, Sharon Olds, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Charles Reznikoff, Adrienne Rich, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Theodore Roethke, Christina Rossetti, Carl Sandburg, Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gary Snyder, May Swenson, Sara Teasdale, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Anna Wickham, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, James Wright, Elinor Wylie, and William Butler Yeats. (2.07)Christopher Burns is a long-time media company executive and reader of poetry. A former Army officer, an amateur musician, and a father of five, he served as Senior Vice President of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Vice President of the Washington Post Company, and Executive Editor of UPI, the worldwide wire service. He is the author of two novels, Island Wilderness and In Sorrow All Our Days, as well as Deadly Decisions, a study of how groups manage and mismanage information.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐About seventy percent of the poems in this anthology were new to me. What I seemed to enjoy most was finding the thirty percent of familiar poems. Some of the poems captivated me while others seemed to speak too much of death and war. There are also poems about fairy tales, ghosts, romantic love and aging. There seems to be an abundance of Carl Sandburg’s poems. (“Fog” is a real classic I love) Denise Levertov is also a favorite.What I found intriguing is how each poem connects to the next with themes or common subjects. Like the exerpt from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman is followed by “A Supermarket in California” in which the poet claims to have seen Walt Whitman shopping.While reading I also loved finding some new poems to love. “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” is quite beautiful and is about a magical woman.Some of the poems I really enjoyed include:”Sea Fever” by John Masefield”Jabberwocky” from Alice in Wonderland”The River Merchant’s Wife” by Rihaku”Meeting at Night” by Robert BrowningSome of the poems are shockingly powerful while others are dreamy. I thought Anne Sexton’s version of Cinderella was a little gruesome. I much preferred poems like “The Road Not Taken” that were comfortable and soothing. I also loved Sara Teasdale’s “Sleepless” as it is filled with longing.So for the most part I enjoyed reading this anthology. There were enough familiar poems to keep my interest and enough new poems to discover new favorites.~The Rebecca Review

⭐This interesting anthology was first copyrighted in 1996 and the Kindle version, which I have came out as Release 3.2 in August 2014. Be sure to read the introduction, otherwise you might not understand how to navigate through the rather eccentrically arranged contents–purportedly by subject, but subjects such as “The Highwayman” and “My Papa’s Waltz.” Plus I love the first sentence:”Great poetry is personal. Like a seashell held to your ear, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart, matching the design of its inner chamber to the contours of your mind.”How true! According to editor, Christopher Burns, the purpose of this anthology is to “re-emphasize the personal aspect of poetry.” He selected poems from “500 years of mostly American and English literature” including Chaucer, but fear not–most of the poems that I’ve read so far are concentrated in the 19th and 20th centuries. According to Burns, a third of the collected poems were written in the last fifty years, and a second third were written between 1900 and 1945.There are poets in here that I don’t ordinarily like, e.g. Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but I’ve also stumbled across gems such as “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish that I immediately printed out and memorized.The Kindle version is set up so that you can keep returning to the Table of Contents (TOC) after you’ve read a particular poem. Or you can read straight through, savoring the poems that (as the editor has stated in his introduction) resonate to the beating of your heart.

⭐An excellent anthology; I was drawn from page to page, poem to poem, and would often go back to re-read offerings I’d been fascinated by. I have returned to its pages time after time, skipping around, re-reading old favorites and newly appreciating previously unfamiliar ones. It stays handy on my Kindle when other books are sent into the cloud

⭐As a new Kindle user (Christmas present) I have quickly learned the value of formatting in ebooks. An early purchase was disappointing because it was hard to get to the material I was interested in – that taught me the importance of a table of contents. When I was looking for a poetry collection for my new Kindle I paid more than I usually would (hey, I’m on a budget) because the reviews mentioned an interactive TOC. I was also intrigued by the editor’s concept of grouping the poems thematically. In both these areas this ebook hits a home-run. It’s a great selection of most of my favorite poets and many of my favorite poems, but with the poems listed thematically I was afraid that it would be hard to look up a specific author or poem. Not to worry – the editor was smart enough to include an index of authors and their works at the end. For me this makes this book well worth the extra few $ over the free or 99 cent anthologies which may have competed on grounds of selection but fall very far behind in terms of accessibitly. In addition, I find that I very much like the grouping of the poems – it adds quite a bit to my reading experience. While scholars might want to focus in on the complete works of a specific poet, I highly recomend this volume for anyone looking to simply enjoy the pleasure of reading good poetry. I expect to spend many hours by the fire in winter and unter a tree in spring with my Kindle and this book.

⭐I have just started getting into poetry and have found dipping in and out of this collection really useful. Its well worth having a copy

⭐I chose 4 stars because I liked the categories by which the poems are organised which cover all of life’s conditions. I also was very pleased that Christopher Burns chose an interesting selection of modern poetry as well as old favourites. He has introduced me to poets, particularly Americans, who are new to me. I could not give the book the extra star because of a couple of misquotes in the Shakespeare passages. Mr Burns must have been quoting from memory and neglected to check the source. The mistakes might seem trivial but in both cases they affect the scansion and rhythm of the verse. I have checked in my own copy of Shakespeare’s works and I am correct. SCANSION MATTERS!

⭐I have this anthology on my Kindle but was disappointed that a high proportion of it is American. I should have checked more carefully before downloading.

⭐La selezione è deludente. La scelta delle opere e degli autori non mi ha soddisfatto. Semplicemente, mi aspettavo qualcosa di diverso.

⭐

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