I'm on the fence about keeping this on my bookshelves in an internet age where almost all of these are in the public domain and easily searched for, so I don't need it on hand to say, be able to reread Masefield's Sea Fever. This is one of four poetry anthologies I own. This contains 123 British and American poems of the 19th and 20th Century. It lacks the international and historical focus of my Book of Woman Poets--it opens with Enheduanna, a Sumerian Priestess who may be the earliest known name in written literature. The Immortal Poems of the English Language offers 447 poems embracing a wide range of the best poets in the language from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, so is a better survey of poetry in the English language. Premier Book of Major Poets offers a thematic grouping: Nature, Love, Humor, Death, etc. All the above also offer more than the usual suspects--the whole reason for this collection is to gather the best known poems--one reviewer who calls this a museum is right. On the other hand, I do appreciate the annotations by Martin Gardner--something two of the previously mentioned anthologies don't offer. It's nice to have the context. ( )

It contains many famous and several infamous poems, and it features many of the poems that my generation's parents and grandparents knew and, i some cases, memorized. Our generation may be the last to have any strong connection to any of these poems, so the book is a bit of a museum. ( )

It's an ugly little book, but it's got all the best poems and it's highly portable. Mixed in with all the familiar ones are some really excellent poems that I'd never read before, and each poet gets a short intro and biography. For the man who penned "The Purple Cow," it includes his own parody:

Yes, I wrote the Purple Cow/I'm sorry now I wrote it
But I can tell you anyhow/I'll kill you if you quote it ( )