A review by celeste57
100 Best-Loved Poems by John Keats, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Li Bai, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edmund Waller, Marianne Moore, Alfred Tennyson, E.E. Cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrew Marvell, Emily John Donne, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Wyatt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Carl Sandburg, John Milton, Philip Smith, George Meredith, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Gray, William Blake, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Richard Lovelace, A.E. Housman, Robert Herrick, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, William Cullen Bryant, William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Leigh Hunt, Ben Jonson, Robert Frost, Christina Rossetti

3.5

There are a lot of poems to love here, but there are a few that I think should not have been included and should have been subbed out for some that are more commonly accepted as universally beloved. Also, while this collection covers a wide swath of poets over the course of nearly 5 centuries, it is remarkably white and Anglocentric. Because of this, I believe the title is a bit of a misnomer. It would have been more appropriate to say that these were 100 of the best-loved poems of the Western canon. But all of that is personal opinion. There were many of my lifelong favorites in this collection, so the nostalgia factor alone, along with the very affordable price, made this a worthwhile acquirement.