Horace Gregory (1898–1982)

The subtitle of "The Silver Swan" is: Poems of Romance and Mystery. The collection spans from the 16th to the 20th centuries, though none of the poems are dated or are in chronological order. They are divided into chapters with names like -- 'Flowers in the Valley', Do You Not Hear the Aziola Cry?', 'Fair-haired Angel of the Evening', etc. which are taken from the first poem in that chapter and serves to point to some nebulous theme which unites the poems. There are some notes in the back for some of the poems or poets, however, it didn't help when there were many poems and authors, unknown to this reader, left without any commentary whatsoever. I found the placement of the poems, without dates or order, haphazard and found that the notes seemed too scant to give any real insight to the poetry overall. It seemed like the editors simply picked out a bunch of poems they liked, including their own, and invented a way to group them that made sense only to themselves--thus the 'mystery' and 'romance'. The poems themselves were interesting for the most part, but this collection? Why?… (meer)