Kevin Young

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, profound, and transformative verse in The New Yorker

W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Louise Bogan, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott, Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Sharon Olds, John Ashbery, Wisława Szymborska, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Franz Wright, Tracy K. Smith, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar, Amanda Gorman: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonders present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drink,” “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 Great Depression,” Young notes); the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, such as Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich); the political 1960s and 1970s;  the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the millennium bringing an explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, furthering 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 Auden and Karl Shapiro and Merwin; 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 by Terrance Hayes, Ada Limon, and others 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 passed-around 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 Ellen Bass or Mary Oliver poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great gathering place for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.