Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor Kevin Young a celebratory selection from one hundred
years of influential entertaining and taste-making verse in The New Yorker Seamus Heaney
Dorothy Parker Louise Bogan Louise Glück Randall Jarrell Langston Hughes Derek Walcott
Sylvia Plath W. S. Merwin Czesław Miłosz Tracy K. Smith Mark Strand E. E. Cummings Sharon
Olds Franz Wright John Ashbery Sandra Cisneros Amanda Gorman Maggie Smith Kaveh Akbar:
these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this
essential anthology. The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell
” “Lunch Break ” “After-Work Drinks ” “Night Shift”) allowing poets from different eras to
talk back to one another in the same space intertwined with chronological groupings from the
decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression ” Young notes)
the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry
like Elizabeth Bishop W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich) the political ’60s and ’70s the
lyrical ’80s and ’90s and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the
magazine greater depth and breadth. Inevitably we see the high points when poems spoke
directly into about or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and
Karl Shapiro the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9 11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s
“Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?) and more recently stunning poems in response to the
cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd. The magazine’s poetic influence
resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection
exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones
you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love
for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard
of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for
poetry a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life even a mirror of our collective
soul.
