Poems of New York [Hardcover]

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city.

All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes’s Harlem to James Merrill’s Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices.

Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer,Poems of New Yorkwill be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.Foreword

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
Mannahatta
Broadway
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)
The House-Top: A Night Piece

AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)
The Taxi
Anticipation

WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)
Arrival at the Waldorf

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)
The Great Figure

SARA TEASDALE (1884–1933)
Union Square
Broadway

MARIANNE MOORE (1887–1972)
New York

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948)
The Tropics in New York
The City’s Love
A Song of the Moon

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)
Recuerdo
‘‘If I should learn’’

DOROTHY PARKER (1893–1967)
Observation

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)
“Taxis toot whirl people moving”

CHARLES REZNIKOFF (l#