The New Lifetime Reading Plan

From the German: Angel Flores, ed., An Anthology of German Poetry from Hхlderlin to Rilke; The Penguin Book of German Verse, ed. Leonard Forster; Anthology of German Poetry through the нQth Century, ed. Gode and Ungar.

From the lrish: Penguin Book oflrish Verse, ed. Brendan Kennelly; Kings, Lords, and Commoners, ed. and tr. by Frank 0'Connor.

From the Russian: New Russian Poets, ed. and tr. by George Reavey.

From the Arahic: Modern Poetry of the Arab World, ed. and tr. by Abdullah al-Udhari.

From the Chinese: Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, and Jonathan Chaves, The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry; Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature; Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature; Wu-chi Liu and Irving Lo, eds., Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry.

From the Japanese: Stephen D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry; Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, From the Country of Eight Islands; Donald Keene, An Anthology of Japanese Literature.

From Indian languages: A.K. Ramanujan et al., eds., The Oxford Book of Modern Indian Poetry.

From African languages: Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry; Stella and Frank Chipasula, eds., The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry.

Carihhean Poetry: Paula Burnett, ed., The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English; Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, eds., The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry.

African-American Poetry: The new Norton Anthology of African- American Literature, ed. Henry Lewis Gates et al., includes both poetry and prose.

Native American Poetry: Margot Astrov, ed., The Winged Serpent; Paula G. Allen, ed., Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1900-1970.

Poetry from Oral Traditiom: Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred.

Books about poetry are not generally very helpful. There are excep- tions. One is Mark Van Doren's Introduction to Poetry. This precedes a good general anthology with 135 pages of sharp, intelligible, no-nonsense commentaries on thirty varied examples of first-rate verse. See also the excellent How Does a Poem Mean by Ciardi and Williams.