A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker

1925-2025

By: New Yorker Magazine Inc, Kevin Young - editor

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Katharine Chin, André Santana, Assaf Cohen, Cary Hite, Cassandra Campbell, Marwan Salama, Hugo Bresson, Rebecca Lowman, Rae De Vine, Kevin Young

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

Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “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 depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater 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 W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; 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 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 passing 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 Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

Poetry range

Great anthology of the last 100 years poetry. Readers were excellent. Read hard "copy" and this too.

The Greatest Collection of Poetry I Have Heard

What is phenomenal about this book is that it contains work from some of the best poets the world has known for the past hundred years. Equally surprising is discovering that some of the poets I recently read first had those poems appear in the pages of The New Yorker. It inspired me to read more, write more, and submit more. This book is practically a poetry workshop. I will study it for years to come.

Great anthology

Great companion to the published book. Some mispronunciations, but what can you do? Not all the poems from the anthology are in the audiobook, but what can you do?