List $39.95

Edited by William Harmon - Performed by an ensemble of contemporary poets - Unabridged Fiction - 5 COMPACT DISCS - 6 hours

Publisher, HighBridge Audio (April 1998)

"What a great idea for a book. First of all it's interesting to see which poems make it, and then…you've got all those great poems." --Roy Blount, Jr.

"Why did no one think of this before?" --New York Times Book Review

Here in one volume are the top one hundred poems, as determined by a survey of more than 1,000 anthologies---the poems in English most frequently anthologized, the poems with the broadest, most enduring appeal. With insights into the historical period in which each poem was written, the verse form used, and connections among poems, this is the ideal introduction to poetry, as well as a treasury for the dedicated reader.

Imagine if Billboard compiled a list of the top 100 poems, chosen not by critics or professors but by the people themselves. That's the concept behind The Classic Hundred, and it works brilliantly. William Harmon found the 100 most anthologized poems in English, based on the ninth edition of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry---the most objective measurement of greatness available, representing consensus among the editors of some 400 anthologies. Then he put them in order and prefaced each one with concise, erudite, often humorous commentary. The range of poets, subjects, and forms---from Shakespeare to Frost, from love and death to crime and punishment, from sonnets to odes---makes this an entertaining, enlightening, and indispensable aural guide to the finest verse in the English language.

Includes:

To Autumn
Kubla Khan
La Belle Dame sans Merci
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Death, Be Not Proud
Love III
To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
My Last Duchess
Pied Beauty
Ode to the West Wind
To His Coy Mistress
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Dove Beach
The Tyger
Upon Julia's Clothes
Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
A Red, Red Rose
Spring and Fall
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners
Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun
Fern Hill
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
Good-Morrow
So, We'll Go No More a-Roving
When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought
The World Is Too Much with Us
And Did Those Feet
The Lamb
Ozymandias
The Second Coming
The Solitary Reaper
……many more