The Classic Hundred: All-Time Favorite Poems.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

Demographics supplant aesthetics. Race, gender, and class have replaced taste as the gauge for admission into the literary pantheon. Yet, here is a new collection of poetry that presumes to be canonical, but is devoid of a single work by an African-American, American Indian, Asian- American , Jewish, Latino, or even Canadian author. Except for Emily Dickinson, every one of its contributors is that bogeyman of the current culture wars-the dead white male.

Editor William Harmon has assembled the 100 works that he claims provide "the best available record of the poems that have achieved the greatest success for the longest time with the largest number of readers." Functioning more as polister than connoisseur, he relied on statistics rather than acumen to make his selections. Using the latest edition of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry, he tabulated the poems that have been anthologized most and reprinted the top 100 in order of their frequency of appearance in earlier collections. The result, which-echoing the hype of pop music-he calls "The Greatest Hits of Poetry in English," is a treasury of familiar recitations.

Leading the pack, forever burning brightily], is William Blake's "The Tyger," though William Shakespeare contributes more entries (eight) than any other author...