Review; Poems Bewitched and Haunted edited by John Hollander

As it's soon Halloween, I couldn't resist reading the poetry anthology Poems Bewitched and Haunted edited by John Hollander and today I'll post my review of the book.

Description from Goodreads
A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.

From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas’s wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches’ brew of poems from the spirit world.

My Thoughts on the Book
There's a nice mix of poems and authors in this anthology, from ancient to more modern ones, so it's possible for lots of people to find something to enjoy. What I missed a bit though, was some Halloween-themed poems, for instance "Halloween" written by Robert Burns, but that's just me though. I did enjoy that there were some translated poems in this anthology, so it wasn't only works by British and/or American poets.

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