{"id":226,"date":"2007-02-20T23:49:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=226"},"modified":"2007-02-20T23:49:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T23:49:00","slug":"top-500-poems-edited-by-william-harmon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2007\/02\/top-500-poems-edited-by-william-harmon.html","title":{"rendered":"The Top 500 Poems edited by William Harmon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It took a while to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/023108028X\/tradgirl\" target=\"'new'\">The Top 500 Poems<\/a>, as you might imagine.  By &#8220;top&#8221;, the editor means the most anthologized poems written in English.  He starts with stuff so old you can&#8217;t make out what they&#8217;re saying and goes all the way up to Allen Ginsberg.  I think I originally had to buy this for a college class but when I sold off my textbooks, I didn&#8217;t sell this one, figuring it would be generally useful.  I&#8217;m glad I kept it as I finally enjoyed reading it.  (I doubt I read more than the assigned pages back in school.)<\/p>\n<p>For the most part, the newer poems are better than the older ones.  This is because I can tell what the hell they&#8217;re saying.  A combination of changes in the English language and changes in what we do on a daily basis make some of the old ones either unintelligible or irrelevant.  I know the words and the general principles involved, but I can&#8217;t grasp a metaphor about plows or planting time.  Metaphors require that you have a fundamental instinct about what the subject is being compared to.  Otherwise, it&#8217;s like explaining how much a white flibbertygibbit resembles a watchmacallit in August.<\/p>\n<p>Of course some of the later poems are unintelligible for other reasons, but that seems to be intentional on the part of the poet.  I rediscovered some old favorites and found a couple of new poets whose works I enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It took a while to read The Top 500 Poems, as you might imagine. By &#8220;top&#8221;, the editor means the most anthologized poems written in English. He starts with stuff so old you can&#8217;t make out what they&#8217;re saying and goes all the way up to Allen Ginsberg. I think I originally had to buy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}