Counting Poems at LitHub

While we were snoozing this weekend, Emily Temple was busy poring over poetry anthologies and tallying up the frequency of poem appearances. The results of those labors are this list of "The Most Anthologized Poems of the Last 25 Years," posted today at LitHub. A note on the methodology:

I looked at the tables of contents for 20 anthologies of poetry published between 1992 and 2016 (you can see the full list of anthologies I surveyed at the bottom of the page) and added them all up. My aim was to see what has been included in “general” poetry anthologies for English-speaking readers, so I looked at anthologies that collected international, American, and English-language poems, and I accepted all time periods, but did not allow for any segmentation or specialization otherwise.

I make no claim to having gotten to every anthology that fits those parameters, of course—consider this a representative sample. Even so, the amount of data I wound up processing was enormous. Poetry anthologies have way more entries in them than short story anthologies, and are sometimes thousands of pages long. I knew this already, of course, but now I know it with my whole body, from shriveled eyes to laptop-burned thighs to cramped feet. But in the end, I got there. I counted all the poems.

Can you guess which poem made it to the top of the list with eleven inclusions? We'll let you head to LitHub to find out, but we will sample the fourth tier with eight inclusions:

Eight Inclusions:
Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light,”
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”
Robert Frost, “Design”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”
James Wright, “A Blessing”
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”