The Best American Poetry 2000 - Best American Poems of The Twentieth Century

Best American Poems of The Twentieth Century

For this book in the series, Lehman, the general editor "invited his 14 past and present guest editors to list their choices for 15 best poems of the century. Most did, but Adrienne Rich refused flat out, and Louise Glück wrote a thoughtful letter, also declining. It said, in part: 'There can't be, I think, the best of the great ... What remains is preference.'"

From the responses Lehman got, he drew up a composite list of 32 poets whose work was nominated by at least two guest editors. In alphabetical order:

  • A. R. Ammons
  • W. H. Auden
  • John Ashbery
  • John Berryman
  • Elizabeth Bishop
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Hart Crane
  • Robert Creeley
  • T. S. Eliot
  • Robert Frost
  • Robert Hayden
  • Langston Hughes
  • Randall Jarrell
  • Kenneth Koch
  • Robert Lowell
  • James Merrill
  • Marianne Moore
  • Frank O'Hara
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Ezra Pound
  • Kenneth Rexroth
  • Edwin Arlington Robinson
  • Theodore Roethke
  • James Schuyler
  • Delmore Schwartz
  • William Stafford
  • Gertrude Stein
  • Wallace Stevens
  • Robert Penn Warren
  • Richard Wilbur
  • William Carlos Williams
  • James Wright

Read more about this topic:  The Best American Poetry 2000

Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, american, poems, twentieth and/or century:

    Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)

    We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, “That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.” You never heard a real American talk in that manner.
    Frank Hague (1876–1956)

    The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The twentieth year is well-nigh past;
    Since first our sky was overcast,
    Ah would that this might be the last!
    My Mary!
    Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
    I see thee daily weaker grow—
    ‘Twas my distress that brought thee low,
    My Mary!
    Thy needles, once a shining store,
    For my sake restless heretofore,
    Now rust disus’d, and shine no more,
    My Mary!
    William Cowper (1731–1800)

    The crow does not hide its prey, but calls for others to share it;
    So wealth will be with those of a like disposition.
    Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)