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The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry
Now with touch screen navigation for Kindle Fire and iPad. The best collection of English and American classics -- new and old. A perfect introduction for those new to poetry, as well as a great selection of old favorites for poetry lovers everywhere. Release 3.2 with fully interactive Kindle contents and expanded index. Readers can link from any poem to other poems by the same author, and from the author index back to any poem. From Geoffrey Chaucer to e.e. cummings, from William Shakespeare to Anne Sexton, here are the great American and British poems of the last 500 years, organized by subject in a new and provocative way. “Great Poetry is personal,� writes Christopher Burns in his introduction to this extraordinary collection. “Like a seashell held to your ear, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart. The poet brings the words, you bring your life, and together you make the song.”Poets as diverse as Tennyson and Teasdale echo the themes of “Western Wind� hundreds of years apart. Maya Angelou and Janet Flanders, like talk show hosts sitting on stools, swap stories about their mothers. Robert Browning and Richard Wilbur, separated by more than a century, talk about the way men look at women. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg describe the America each has found. Here are the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg, often ignored in the last few years, along with the masterpieces of William Butler Yeats, e. e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Denise Levertov and Langston Hughes. Some of the poems are funny, others are sad, but all are unforgettable. Great poetry transcends the boundaries of place, time, gender, and race. Although there was no intention to be representative, half the poems were written by Americans and half by English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Canadian poets. And this anthology is a third of the poems were written in the last fifty years and a third were written between 1900 and 1945. The poems are organized to follow the contours of the loneliness of the artist, the uses of war, the role of nature, the constancy of love, and the coming on of death. And like all great poems, they are about you. As you read them, be prepared to hear your own heart roaring in your ear.Poets represented by more than one poem John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, John Berryman, William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll. Mary Coleridge, e. e. cummings, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot, Mari Evans, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Robinson Jeffers, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Etheridge Knight, D. H. Lawrence, Denise Levertov, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, Claude McKay, W.S. Merwin, Charlotte Mew, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Mlton, Sharon Olds, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Charles Reznikoff, Adrienne Rich, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Theodore Roethke, Christina Rossetti, Carl Sandburg, Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gary Snyder, May Swenson, Sara Teasdale, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Anna Wickham, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, James Wright, Elinor Wylie, and William Butler Yeats. (2.07)Christopher Burns is a long-time media company executive and reader of poetry. A former Army officer, an amateur musician, and a father of five, he served as Senior Vice President of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Vice President of the Washington Post Company, and Executive Editor of UPI, the worldwide wire service.
349 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1996
188 people are currently reading
458 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Burns
11books6followersChristopher Burns started his career as assistant to the Director of the Yale University Press, and at the Director’s suggestion, enrolled in IBM’s new course on the fundamentals of computing, intended to train professional programmers and systems analysts. During his years at the Yale Press, he wrote a major industry study on computerized production technologies and built the first database of books for the Yale Co-op bookstore. Years later, he designed the Onyx database of book data now used by Amazon and publishers around the world.
In the spring of 1968, after graduating from Army Officer Candidate School, he was assigned as chief of computer operations at a secure communications center serving the White House, the Pentagon, and other classified organizations on the East Coast. Then, as Command Information Officer for the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, he led a detachment of reporters and photographers putting out a weekly newspaper, a monthly magazine, and two books, one of which was later named the best Army publication of the year.
On his return, he joined the Harvard University Press where he launched the new Harvard Paperback series. He was later recruited by Arthur D. Little, Inc., a well-known Cambridge research and consulting firm, and began a long practice in the future of new information technologies, office automation, and online publishing. As a consultant and large-scale systems designer, he led the development of digital publishing systems for United Nations headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the governments of the U.S., Ireland, and Iran, as well as dozens of the country’s largest corporations.
In 1980, he went to the Washington Post Company as Vice President/Planning, still focusing on the future of computer technology and the media. And from there he moved to the management side as Senior Vice President (general manager) of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. After three years he returned to systems design and technology consulting with his own practice, and for the next 25 years followed the rise of the internet and the birth of digital information services, deeply involved in the development of new online networks for several governments and most of the major companies in the information industry sector. He spent a year as Executive Editor of UPI, the worldwide news service, and served on the boards of the Information Industry Association and several information industry startups.
Mr. Burns has two patents on online information technology, covering the field of consumer networks and the emerging Internet of Things. In the last few years, he has turned primarily to writing, having published Deadly Decisions (Prometheus), The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry (Random House), Vietnam Album, a history of the war, The New Old Age (Seashell Press), Immortal Poets (another anthology of poetry with history and biographies), and several novels.
In the spring of 1968, after graduating from Army Officer Candidate School, he was assigned as chief of computer operations at a secure communications center serving the White House, the Pentagon, and other classified organizations on the East Coast. Then, as Command Information Officer for the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, he led a detachment of reporters and photographers putting out a weekly newspaper, a monthly magazine, and two books, one of which was later named the best Army publication of the year.
On his return, he joined the Harvard University Press where he launched the new Harvard Paperback series. He was later recruited by Arthur D. Little, Inc., a well-known Cambridge research and consulting firm, and began a long practice in the future of new information technologies, office automation, and online publishing. As a consultant and large-scale systems designer, he led the development of digital publishing systems for United Nations headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the governments of the U.S., Ireland, and Iran, as well as dozens of the country’s largest corporations.
In 1980, he went to the Washington Post Company as Vice President/Planning, still focusing on the future of computer technology and the media. And from there he moved to the management side as Senior Vice President (general manager) of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. After three years he returned to systems design and technology consulting with his own practice, and for the next 25 years followed the rise of the internet and the birth of digital information services, deeply involved in the development of new online networks for several governments and most of the major companies in the information industry sector. He spent a year as Executive Editor of UPI, the worldwide news service, and served on the boards of the Information Industry Association and several information industry startups.
Mr. Burns has two patents on online information technology, covering the field of consumer networks and the emerging Internet of Things. In the last few years, he has turned primarily to writing, having published Deadly Decisions (Prometheus), The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry (Random House), Vietnam Album, a history of the war, The New Old Age (Seashell Press), Immortal Poets (another anthology of poetry with history and biographies), and several novels.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
June 18, 2021
This is a diverse collection of favorite poets from Carl Sandburg to Chaucer organized into eleven interesting sections such as "Creation" and "What Lips My Lips". It's on my Kindle and even though I've read the entire 349 pages a couple of times, I am always delighted to read poems such as "Digging" by Seamus Heaney, "The Song of the Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and many, many others.
January 29, 2019
Marvelous. A tonic for a bad day.
September 24, 2019
Inexpensive addition to your Kindle collection -- I keep this on my phone!
“Like a seashell held your year, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart, matching the designs of its inner chamber to the contours of your mind.� So opens Christopher Burns on this anthology of favorites. Like Martin Gardner’s , this collection is full of old warhorses, much of it written in traditional meter or else highly disciplined free verse, making it a wonderful introduction to poem-reading for any young person, or else a poetry reader like myself who has strayed too long into the dark prosaic woods of history, philosophy and social novel.
The poets represented here feel remarkably balanced and just, with a good selection of African-American poets, most notably Langston Hughes, but also three intriguing pieces by Mari Evans, b. 1923, whom I had not heard of. The most well-represented woman writer is Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I remember Auden and his boyfriend made fun of. It’s understandable, as her big, epic optimism holds less room for irony and layers of psyche than modern consciousness calls for. But Millay gives us gorgeous song, as much as any Beethoven symphony. In fact, Millay seems an American Romantic, along with Thoedore Roethke and Carl Sandburg, two more favorites of the volume. Roethke is dark, though, and Sandburg is darker still. It’s like Whitman met the twentieth century and just had to have a few drinks, and tawdry affairs. There’s a lot of Anne Sexton in here, too, and quite rightly, for she, like Sandburg and Roethke and Millay, pours modern ironies into tight, formal, musical poems.
There is virtually no lazy verse or doggerel anywhere in the volume, a nice thing about anthologies, I suppose.
Why I think this is a five-star book: the arrangement of the anthology. The thematic sequencing of the poems makes for substantial connections between poems, and occasionally makes us reflect on a poem’s theme, which we might not have noticed before. By beginning with “The Creation� and ending with “Death Be Not Proud,� a sense of narrative automatically sets in, making the anthology something a picaresque, in which some collective “we� gives praise, then rebels (“For My People,� “The Highwayman�), fights in the war, then wanders in the woods, (“Arms and the Boy,� “The Way Through the Woods�), loves, marries (“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,� “If Ever Two Were One�), has a family, wanders again (“My Papa’s Waltz,� “Wanderer’s Song�), passes through the dark night of the soul, and at last dies (“Acquainted with the Night,� “Death Be Not Proud�). Not that I read all of the poems in order, far from it, but this narrative feel makes poems resonate with one another. “My Papa’s Waltz,� for example, when it juxtaposes voices as various as Theodore Roethke and Maya Angelou and Imamu Amiri Baraka on the fragmentary nature of family sentiment, a deeper sense of humanity emerges. Other times the placement of a poem in a category gives us productive pause, as when we find in “The Wanderer’s Song,� contemplative poems like “My Erotic Double� by John Ashbery or “The Soul Selects Her Own Society� by Emily Dickinson. And while in “The Way Through the Woods� we are not surprised to see “The Road Not Taken,� or even “The Tiger,� it is curious to read there “Love Calls Us to Things of This World� by Richard Wilbur, or “Root Cellar� by Theodore Roethke. But Wilbur and Roethke are wanderers of the mind, first and foremost.
A humble triumph, and a reminder that anthologies can be fun.
“Like a seashell held your year, a poem resonates to the beating of your heart, matching the designs of its inner chamber to the contours of your mind.� So opens Christopher Burns on this anthology of favorites. Like Martin Gardner’s , this collection is full of old warhorses, much of it written in traditional meter or else highly disciplined free verse, making it a wonderful introduction to poem-reading for any young person, or else a poetry reader like myself who has strayed too long into the dark prosaic woods of history, philosophy and social novel.
The poets represented here feel remarkably balanced and just, with a good selection of African-American poets, most notably Langston Hughes, but also three intriguing pieces by Mari Evans, b. 1923, whom I had not heard of. The most well-represented woman writer is Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I remember Auden and his boyfriend made fun of. It’s understandable, as her big, epic optimism holds less room for irony and layers of psyche than modern consciousness calls for. But Millay gives us gorgeous song, as much as any Beethoven symphony. In fact, Millay seems an American Romantic, along with Thoedore Roethke and Carl Sandburg, two more favorites of the volume. Roethke is dark, though, and Sandburg is darker still. It’s like Whitman met the twentieth century and just had to have a few drinks, and tawdry affairs. There’s a lot of Anne Sexton in here, too, and quite rightly, for she, like Sandburg and Roethke and Millay, pours modern ironies into tight, formal, musical poems.
There is virtually no lazy verse or doggerel anywhere in the volume, a nice thing about anthologies, I suppose.
Why I think this is a five-star book: the arrangement of the anthology. The thematic sequencing of the poems makes for substantial connections between poems, and occasionally makes us reflect on a poem’s theme, which we might not have noticed before. By beginning with “The Creation� and ending with “Death Be Not Proud,� a sense of narrative automatically sets in, making the anthology something a picaresque, in which some collective “we� gives praise, then rebels (“For My People,� “The Highwayman�), fights in the war, then wanders in the woods, (“Arms and the Boy,� “The Way Through the Woods�), loves, marries (“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,� “If Ever Two Were One�), has a family, wanders again (“My Papa’s Waltz,� “Wanderer’s Song�), passes through the dark night of the soul, and at last dies (“Acquainted with the Night,� “Death Be Not Proud�). Not that I read all of the poems in order, far from it, but this narrative feel makes poems resonate with one another. “My Papa’s Waltz,� for example, when it juxtaposes voices as various as Theodore Roethke and Maya Angelou and Imamu Amiri Baraka on the fragmentary nature of family sentiment, a deeper sense of humanity emerges. Other times the placement of a poem in a category gives us productive pause, as when we find in “The Wanderer’s Song,� contemplative poems like “My Erotic Double� by John Ashbery or “The Soul Selects Her Own Society� by Emily Dickinson. And while in “The Way Through the Woods� we are not surprised to see “The Road Not Taken,� or even “The Tiger,� it is curious to read there “Love Calls Us to Things of This World� by Richard Wilbur, or “Root Cellar� by Theodore Roethke. But Wilbur and Roethke are wanderers of the mind, first and foremost.
A humble triumph, and a reminder that anthologies can be fun.
January 18, 2012
I've marked this book as read, but, really, a book like this is never truly finished. It's the kind of thing you just keep reading and if you own a Kindle this is one of the best poetry anthologies out there for it.
May 15, 2024
This anthology included several delightful and new-to-me poems that I really liked, among them "The Eagle" by Tennyson, "The Watch" by Frances Cornford, "The Bird" by Rabindranath Tagore, "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry, and "The Rebel" by Mari Evans. The latter is about the speaker's funeral and the curiosity seekers who come to see if she's going to stir up more trouble. "The Watch" ends with the watch ticking "I am so sick so sick so sick / O Death come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick...." Don't you just hear that clock ticking and the desire to die?
Thus, this was a nice enough anthology but read on a Kindle--never the best choice for poetry if you ask me. For one, the Kindle edition did not mention the author's full name or the date at all, that is, until the end of the poem, which could be pages away. I like this info upfront. However, the ability to easily navigate to the index or table of contents and press on the underlined poem or author I wanted to revisit was a nice feature on my Kindle. Oh, and I hated The Highwayman section and collection of poems. Too many ballad-types, which I'm not crazy about, even in a song. I did not care two hoots about the 1907 Robert Service ballad-poems of "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" or "The Cremation of Sam McGhee." Even those by Stephen Vincent Benet and Robert Frost and others left me cold. Still, this section aside, I liked this anthology just fine.
Thus, this was a nice enough anthology but read on a Kindle--never the best choice for poetry if you ask me. For one, the Kindle edition did not mention the author's full name or the date at all, that is, until the end of the poem, which could be pages away. I like this info upfront. However, the ability to easily navigate to the index or table of contents and press on the underlined poem or author I wanted to revisit was a nice feature on my Kindle. Oh, and I hated The Highwayman section and collection of poems. Too many ballad-types, which I'm not crazy about, even in a song. I did not care two hoots about the 1907 Robert Service ballad-poems of "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" or "The Cremation of Sam McGhee." Even those by Stephen Vincent Benet and Robert Frost and others left me cold. Still, this section aside, I liked this anthology just fine.
April 1, 2018
Loved this collection.
A book I will keep and return to often. In particular, enjoyed how the poems are classified. Be sure to read the forward to understand intent of how the anthology is organized .
A book I will keep and return to often. In particular, enjoyed how the poems are classified. Be sure to read the forward to understand intent of how the anthology is organized .
July 26, 2021
I like to have a book of poetry going. This took me over a year to read by delving into just a few selections a day. It has a wide variety and some great poems. It's a good book to have around to open up randomly when you just happen to need to read a poem or two.
August 26, 2017
Amazing. Captivating. Beautiful. Heartbreaking. All the things.
February 26, 2018
Good, not great
I would say this is average far as anthologies go. Fair selections but I've definitely read better. Good, not great.
I would say this is average far as anthologies go. Fair selections but I've definitely read better. Good, not great.
October 28, 2018
I enjoyed this collection. Most of the poets I knew and some were new to me. I read the book over several weeks. I read a poem or two each morning.
August 24, 2019
I loved this selection of poems. It was wide ranging and beautiful.
November 2, 2020
Great selection of poems. I love to pick it up and read a random poem.
September 18, 2011
Thank you Burns. There are better collections out there for sure, but I like the inclusion of so many contemporary authors, and especially glad to see a collection that isn't demonstrably politically correct WASP-y. THis anthology doesn't apologize. Glad to see Sandburg along the likes of Creeley, too much Langston Hughes, Sexton, and where is T. Hughes? The possiblities of an anthology are of course limited, I don't recommend this anthology and would instead recommend shorter more pointed collections, adn for those interested in contemporary poetry, Norton has a a great collection.
September 25, 2014
I won this book through a goodreads giveaway.
This is the ultimate collection for the long-time poetry lover or for those who are just "dipping their toes in the pond". I read old favorites and undiscovered gems. I finished the book in two day but have since carried it around with me everywhere. I even read a poem or two a night to my thirteen year old daughter who I found shares my affinity to Romantics. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone, anywhere at anytime; the words within have the ability to "speak" to all if only they crack the cover.
This is the ultimate collection for the long-time poetry lover or for those who are just "dipping their toes in the pond". I read old favorites and undiscovered gems. I finished the book in two day but have since carried it around with me everywhere. I even read a poem or two a night to my thirteen year old daughter who I found shares my affinity to Romantics. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone, anywhere at anytime; the words within have the ability to "speak" to all if only they crack the cover.
January 27, 2011
Wow, this is an amazingly good collection! Burns is a great anthologist -- the poems are arranged so that they reflect or comment on each other.
I bought it for the Kindle -- I probably have a quarter or more of the poems already in various physical books, but this lets me carry them along wherever I go. I don't usually read poetry anthologies straight through, from cover to cover, but this one I did.
I bought it for the Kindle -- I probably have a quarter or more of the poems already in various physical books, but this lets me carry them along wherever I go. I don't usually read poetry anthologies straight through, from cover to cover, but this one I did.
May 16, 2013
I won this book in a ŷ giveaway. The introduction is well written and charming. The anthology is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Reading this book taught me a little about myself. It has been 31 years (yikes!) since I got my B.A. in English, and in the years since I have indulged in the luxury of only reading poets I like. This anthology reminded me of the scope of poetry and its themes.
Want to read
August 29, 2013So far the good poems are sparse, but I am not far into the book. All are well written, but much of the substance is questionable. The first poem is on how God created the world because he was bored. Not very illuminating, and quite untrue if one is consulting special revelation. However, I would be pleased to find at least 20 gems in this anthology. I suspect that I will. I will share them as I do.
April 26, 2010
One of the best anthologies I've read. The chapter on love poems was my favorite because they included the dark poems one seldom reads about love and relationships that were sometimes funny sometimes sad but always very very true.
August 29, 2012
The is a "best of" collection that I keep handy on my Kindle at all times. The anthology features renowned poets of the English language and is a must-have for all writers and readers of poetry. If you are a poet, dip into it when you're feeling stuck. The poems are organized by theme.
November 15, 2007
Simply Amazing!
June 5, 2011
An excellent collection - one of the first books to go on my kindle. Great for dipping
January 22, 2013
I've always been skeptical of poetry collections, but this one is so well collected and organized that I can't help but love it.
April 6, 2016
Excellent collection
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
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