The first hurdle in reading Camille Paglia's book "Break Blow Burn" is in parsing the subtitle "Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems. "On looking at the table of contents, one will see that it is the English-speaking world which is represented in the book. These are poems originally written in English, so evidently "the World's Best Poems" include no translations, simply because, as Paglia explains in her introduction, "translation is so problematic." Ok, fine, but then the subtitle should reflect that, don't you think? It’s not that the subtitle is not logically accurate (after all, forty-three of the best does not preclude others of the best being non-English or English translations), but, as Paglia states in her introduction, her book is meant for the general reader. Granted, the reader will be introduced to the concept of the close reading of poems, but must they need to begin with a close reading of the subtitle?

I’m allowing myself to bust Paglia’s chops, although I enjoyed this book very much. In fact, it helped to reaffirm the importance of the short lyric for me at a time when I was depressed about the likelihood that most short lyrics are nothing more than the “Mc Poems”that Donald Hall so contemptuously dubbed them. And it seems Paglia would agree with that assessment. She expresses her shock at how weak individual poems have become over the past forty years. She claims they have lost ambition, and they either dribble away their suggestiveness or rephrase and hammer it into obviousness. She touches on the crux of my personal dilemma by contrasting the poems created for the stage vs. those written for the page. In our literate world, it is on the page where Paglia thinks the poem is destined to survive or die as a visual construct. Curiously, for having come down on the side of a poem’s visual worth, there are no concrete poems included among the anointed forty-three. Perhaps this is explained by her statement later in the introduction: “For me poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.”

So what were the criteria used for choosing the “best”? There seems to have been two. The first half of the book contains what Paglia calls canonical writings which have been most successful for her in her classroom. The modern half of the book contains poems which she felt she could enthusiastically recommend to the general reader: poems which would reward close scrutiny and bear as many as half a dozen re-readings in a row. For both halves it seems she has chosen poems which she feels appeal to both the ear and the eye: poems written by those who are more than “mouthers of slippery discourse.”

Her canonical choices seem relatively safe: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge. Perhaps her omissions are more debatable. After Coleridge the choices become more American: Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Hughes, Roethke, Lowell, Plath, and others (with two by Yeats being a significant exception.)

As Tony Shalhoub’s character Monk would say: “Now here’s the thing.” Although I enjoyed the experience of reading the book, I don’t remember one thing from it. There was not one observation that was impressive enough to stick in my memory. The main thing the book provided me was the impression that, if someone as smart as Paglia would spend over 200 pages analyzing lyric poetry, then perhaps writing lyric poetry is not so trivial a thing after all. So, I suspect the book succeeds as an interesting introduction for the general reader. For those who are already steeped in poetry, I suspect it will be an enjoyable, and perhaps forgettable, reading experience.