Anthologies

In this month's mathematical look at poetry, we tackle anthologies.

Anthology Facts

The first anthology to present the sonnet form to a large English audience was Tottel's Miscellany or Songes and Sonnets, published in 1557.

The first poetry anthology published in America was American Poems: Selected and Original, 1793. It cost $1.

The first anthology of African American poetry was Les Cenelles, published in 1845 in New Orleans. It featured poems by 17 gens de couleur libres (free men of color) written in French.

The earliest-known poetry anthology is Anthologia Graeca, the Greek anthology published circa 60 B.C., which was edited by Meleager of Gadara and featured 47 poets.

More than 5,900 poetry anthologies are for sale on Amazon.com, including 315 collections of poetry about dogs, 619 "best of" anthologies, and 845 love-poem collections.

In the week before Christmas 2005, more than 20,206 poetry anthologies were sold in the United States (Nielsen BookScan).

Of the 185 poems in Garrison Keillor's anthology Good Poems for Hard Times, 48 mention food and drink, 43 mention the weather and seasons, and two mention Freud and his theories.


The 16 Most Taught Poems in America's College Classrooms
The editors at W.W. Norton recently shared with us the results of a survey they conducted in preparing for the next edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. They asked college professors of English which poems they most often taught in their classrooms. Here are the results:

1. General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
2. Sonnet #130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" by William Shakespeare
3. Holy Sonnet #14, "Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You" by John Donne
4. Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
5. Go Down Moses, Spiritual
6. Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
7. 287, "A Clock stopped—" by Emily Dickinson
8. Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats
9. In the Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
10. Poetry by Marianne Moore
11. Theme for English B by Langston Hughes
12. Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
13. We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
14. Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
15. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
16. Digging by Seamus Heaney

First Published African-American Anthology

The first anthology of African American poetry was Les Cenelles, published in 1845 in New Orleans. It featured the poems by 17 gens de couleur libres (free men of color) written in French. See a slide show of this and other historically significant anthologies in our Gallery.
See a slide show of this and other historically significant anthologies >>