The Anthologist
# The Anthologist

The Anthologist is a novel about poetry by Nicholson Baker, which was first published in 2009.

Its protagonist is Paul Chowder, a poet with a commission to prepare and edit an anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. The novel shows his life, his thoughts, aspirations and struggles with writer's block.

## Reception

Michael Schmidt, reviewing the book for The Independent, gave it a mixed reception,

   The ineffectual protagonist is a beguiling misfit, advancing at tangents, a pair of ragged claws. The novel misfires when this voice is overridden by that of the author who makes Chowder into his own spokesman, giving him opinions on Larkin, Marinetti or Pound, either at odds with the character or outside the parameters of the novel.

David Orr, reviewing for The New York Times, liked the novel's portrayal of, and engagement with, the world of poets and poetry,

   Yet somehow Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that’s actually about poetry — and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do.

## Poets and works discussed

| Chapter 1 Sir Walter Scott Edward Lear Dr. Seuss Rudyard Kipling Sidney Lanier Derek Attridge (academic) Chapter 2 Alice Quinn (The New Yorker poetry editor) Paul Muldoon (editor) Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven Chapter 3 Mina Loy Howard Moss W. D. Snodgrass Chapter 4 Mary Oliver Louise Bogan W. H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts Thomas Babington Macaulay - Lays of Ancient Rome | Chapter 5 Amy Lowell James Wright Haiku Chapter 6 Thomas Campion Samuel Daniel Coventry Patmore W. S. Merwin Ezra Pound Chapter 7 Elizabeth Bishop Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter 8 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Robert Herrick - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time Horace - Carpe Diem Chapter 9 Walt Whitman Ted Kooser Karl Shapiro John Dryden Elizabeth Bishop - The Fish | Chapter 10 Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade Vachel Lindsay Sara Teasdale Allen Ginsberg Chapter 11 John Greenleaf Whittier Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter 12 Algernon Charles Swinburne Ted Roethke Aphra Behn Chapter 13 Carl Sandburg Chapter 14 John Dryden - Mac Flecknoe Samuel Johnson Chapter 15 James Fenton - The Vapour Trail John Ashbery |
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