Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry, The by Christopher Burns (Editor); 1996. Hardcover.

“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.”

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.

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. 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.