If you wanted to cover some short stories and poems in middle school

[conuly]

which ones would you pick? Public domain preferred, but if there's a super great anthology out there, I'm good with that too.

Comments

[siderea]

When I was a freshman(? or was it senior year?) in high school, my English class had a poetry textbook I remember as being quite excellent: Sound and Sense. Note there are multiple editions, including recent editions where the editorship has been taken over by two new people (and the book retitled Perrine's Sound and Sense.

Looking over reviews of various edition (we used whatever was available in 1986-1989 – can't comment to which edition to get), this seems to be a particularly beloved book by teachers and students alike. It has the singular claim to fame to be both prized by poetry lovers and people who came to it poetry haters. There are reviewers saying that they got the book because it was such a dense anthology of excellent poetry, figuring they'd ignore the textbooky bits, but then really liking the didaction; there are people who said they hated poetry until they read this book and learned how to appreciate poetry.

I remember it introduced me to Auden and Aiken, which in retrospect, damn, wouldn't have expected that in a high school textbook. Yates, Houseman, Hughes, Tennyson, Dickinson, Frost, Shakespeare, Cullen, etc, etc, etc.

[conuly]

Good advice on the anthology, thanks.