The New Yorker Book of Poems [antikvár]

ForewordAll anthologists are fallible. Those whose choices are restricted to the files of a particular magazine face additional hazards. For one thing, they can choose only from what has already been chosen. For another, when a considerable time span is covered, a question comes up: Should the book be simply a collection of what the editors think is excellent, or should some consideration be given to the historical recordsome attempt made to reflect the temper of a particular time, the styles of a particular period, the attitudes of a particular decade? In the end, we were persuaded that we could honor the other considerations without departing from the criterion of excellence. We would like to believe that these nine hundred poems broadly represent almost a half-century of poetry and are among the best poems that appeared in The New Yorker between 1925 and 196g.The contents of this book are arranged in what may strike the reader at first as an odd way. The poems are printed alphabetically by title. We tried other arrangements, but this one seemed, finally, to provide the most variety and therefore to be truer to the way poems actually appear in The New Yorker week after week. For the convenience of the reader, there is an index in which the poems are arranged alphabetically by author.Sometimes a poet changes the title of a poem before including it in a book. Sometimes he revises a poem. All the poems here are reprinted in the original versions published in The New Yorker.The Editors