Reviews for Poor tiger

The average rating for Poor tiger based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-19 00:00:00 Tricia Babbitt I don't know if I'll ever "finish" this book, but I decided to re-read a bunch of the earlier British and American poets anthologized in here--not Whitman or Dickinson or Hopkins all of whom are great and who I read anyway. And a strange thing happened: I found out that most of these poets who commanded such huge audiences in their time, and such prestige, aren't all that readable today. Emily Bronte--nope. Fitzgerald--please. Edward Lear is still fun. Longfellow was surprisingly readable. His "Snow flakes" is perfectly Imagist. Oliver Wendell Holmes--not bad. James Russell Lowell --light but maybe. But Robert Browning who I always admired is far too long winded. Borges in his book A Course on English Literature (1966) which I am reading alongside this book, says he should have written in prose. Aside from "My Last Duchess" I agree. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" also holds up, and "Rugby Chapel." The big surprise is how fabulous Tennyson remains. He was targeted by the moderns like Pound and Eliot and soundly trounced by subsequent poets, and Borges doesn't even write about him. But I read all 64 pages of Auden's selections and then re-read them, and went on to another small volume I have of his shorter poems. The longer ones selected here gave me a taste for his narrative poems too. I may try those. He wrote for sixty years and so there are lower spots, but his ear and his command of the language is more perfect even than Shakespeare's. It seems as though he could make music out of any combination of words. His ideas aren't great, but he's never pretentious. His narratives are entertaining--you want to know what happens next. And some of the parts of In Memoriam A.H.H. are simply delicious after all these years. Who would have guessed it?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-21 00:00:00 Matthew Shaw A superb collection, with masterful selections by the editors (I would expect nothing less from a work compiled in part by W. H. Auden). The problem that I have with Norton Anthologies of Poetry is that they're just too large and wearying; I consider them reference books, to be used when necessary. On the other hand, a book like this is compulsively readable, and the fact that it focuses on a period of only forty-four years worth of English language poetry means that it can exhaustively cover the best that was written in those years. With so many brilliant entries (Whitman's unsurpassed When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Tennyson's elegiac verses, Christina Rosetti's hymns, Browning's dramatic monologues, Edward Lear's nonsense, Swinburne's masochistic lines, Emily Dickinson's compact masterworks, the entirety of Lewis Carroll's sublime The Hunting of the Snark) this is a collection well-worth owning and returning to often.