Kirkus Reviews QR Code
A TREASURY OF FAVORITE POEMS by Frances Parkinson-Ed. Keyes

A TREASURY OF FAVORITE POEMS

By

Pub Date: April 10th, 1963
Publisher: Hawthorn

From old scrapbooks, the old favorites of an old favorite (even an occasional one of her own) have been collected in one volume. Topically arranged, from ""Open Sesame"" to ""Envoi"" with Love and Friendship, Death, Faith, Motherhood, etc. in between, the poems range from Shakespeare and Milton to Edgar Guest and Alice Duer Miller, from the English romantics and that worst of French romantics- Victor Hugo, to many unknown or if known- forgotten, lady poetesses. Some ""modern poems"" have been omitted because they were ""too prohibitive in price""; to reassure the 20th century, there is an Updike, a Donald Hall, a smattering of Nash, McKinley and Parker. The virtue of a collection such as this is its recognition- also its failing; all the old poetic chestnut--standbys are here (Browning's Home Thoughts, Kenley's Invictus, Milton's Blindness, Housman's One-And-Twenty, etc.) and they have been over-collected. The editor's choice is for the untutored home-owner although a number of better collections readily come to mind.