POETREE

I've been meaning to link this for a while: much of my reading of late, outside of Japanese Stuff, has been from Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes edited by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the late 1870s, near the end of his life. It is, to put it mildly, massive: I believe those 31 volumes were octavos (if not 12mo.), but the whole still comes to over 4000 ePub pages. Not everything is universally good, but most of it is technically competent Victorian poetry (of the sort Longfellow himself wrote), and if there was good actively poetry written about (or more commonly occasioned by) a place, he seems to have found it. Regardless, it makes a fascinating portrait of the attitudes of the time towards the world.

---L.