World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time Book

World Poetry is an incomparable collection in which the ancient and the contemporary are seamlessly interwoven; it is a cornucopia of surprises. When you turn to the Dante section, instead of finding excerpts from well-known versions of the Commedia, there are selections by poets such as Shelley, Howard Nemerov, Susan Mitchell, and James Schuyler.

World Poetry can be read in the light of Ezra Pound's dicta: points define a periphery. The editors scoured the archives for versions that would stand as poems on their own. When nothing met their standards, as in the case of Victor Hugo, Maurice Scève, or Gottfried Benn, they commissioned new translations. Louis Simpson gives new life to Hugo's famous poem about Napoleon's armies, "Expiation":

It was snowing, always snowing! The cold lash
Whistled. These warriors had no bread to eat,
They walked across the ice with naked feet.
No longer living hearts, they seemed to be
A dream lost in a fog, a mystery,
A march of shadows under a black sky.
Vast solitudes, appalling to the eye,
Stretched out, mute and revengeful, everywhere.

What are we really? Pain's return address.
A ball for luck, blindfolded, to kick around.
A flick of the switch. A stage darkened by fear.
A candle doused, snow melting on bare ground.
Life slips away like gossip or last night's joke.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Whatever breathes will vanish into air.
Our graves are large and lonely. What's left to say?
We're smoke that the wind has caught, and blown away.
(from "Misery," trans. Christopher Benfey)

In the case of your favorite poets, you're bound to quarrel with the selection. It is thrilling to find the "At five in the afternoon" section of Lorca's great elegy to the bullfighter Ignacio Sénchez Mejías, but it seems inappropriate to publish half of Eugenio Montale's "Motets," instead of choosing several of his self-enclosed, dynamic, shorter poems. But arguing with the anthologists is part of the fun, and you're free to return with a vengeance to the poems that you think should have been included. World Poetry is an ideal book to have if you're going to be away from your own library for any amount of time. It is easy to get lost in its opulence, roaming the points of its compass.