A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, edited by Kevin Young

A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025

Edited by Kevin Young

Knopf 2025

The New Yorker magazine turns an amazing 100 years old in 2025, and in honor of the occasion, Knopf has so far published two heavy, beautiful anthology volumes, one dedicated to the short stories that have famously characterized the magazine for decades, and the other dedicated to the New Yorker’s poetry, edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young. He’s produced a thousand-page collection of poems arranged not only by decade but also by times of day: Lunch Break, After-Work Drink, Last Train Home, and so on.

With any anthology, but particularly with an occasion as momentous as a hundred-year birthday, readers can imagine what an editor’s vision for the project would be: appreciative, wide-ranging, affectionate when looking back over a full century. Collections this big necessarily chart not only the history of a venue but also the history of a literature, as Young notes in his opening remarks. “Much like the intrepid fiction that fills each issue,” he notes, “the poems in the New Yorker take us on a journey, often through a writer’s own evolving styles, themes, losses, and lessons.”

The journey cliché is familiar and comforting, but as Young’s Introduction goes on to make clear, his own vision for this project is very pointed. He combed through physical back-issues for the magazine’s 13,500 published poems, but he wasn’t looking the best and certainly not the most representative. He was looking for skin color. With only a couple of exceptions, he found, The New Yorker didn’t publish any non-white poet for its first seventy-five years, and as he repeatedly says, that can’t possibly have been an accident. “It isn’t enough to say that the magazine merely overlooked or ignored Black and brown poets for decades; one has to try hard to miss nearly a century of Black poetry and its vibrancy across much of the twentieth century,” he writes. “Such omissions or metaphoric redlining are not only not accidental but look more and more like a systemic failing of the imagination, reminding us that any recent broadening of poetry is both welcome and awfully late to the party.”

Most editors wouldn’t choose the occasion of a high-profile publication as the right time to accuse all their predecessors of being stubbornly intentional racists, and if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing and what it might signify, it will cast A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker in a very different, far less attractive light – not because the presence of nonwhite poets isn’t welcome, but because this percentage of nonwhite poets doesn’t represent the magazine’s actual history. Kevin Young hasn’t crafted a volume commemorating a century of verse in The New Yorker; he’s shaped a thousand-page reprimand to the magazine that employs him. Readers might naturally wonder who was left out so his archival recoveries could be left in.

At least one person wasn’t left out: Young himself. He includes four of his own poems in the anthology he’s editing. That’s more than Richard Wilbur gets; it’s more than James Schuyler, May Sarton, Octavio Paz, Dorothy Parker, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, Pablo Neruda, Stanley Kunitz, Erica Jong, John Updike, EE Cummings, Amy Clampitt, Thom Gunn, Randall Jarrell, Joseph Brodsky, Donald Hall, Eudora Welty, Tomas Transtromer, Stephen Spender, or Delmore Schwartz. Young gives himself more entries in this book than he gives to Borges, Nabokov, or Auden.

Young writes that good poems “make the everyday extraordinary and turn the extraordinary into a daily occurrence,” that they “remain both timely and timeless” – again, easy, comforting sentiments, and ones that would have gone down much smoother if this big anthology didn’t so often feel like an angry vanity project. Fortunately, even the most wary reader will still have pages and pages of wonderful verse to lure them in.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News