I was thinking about doing my first poetry collection, I was thinking about doing 99 poems. How many poems do you realistically think I should I include in it?
This really depends on how long each poem is, as well as personal taste. 99 poems sounds like a nice number, but how long does this make the anthology? Since this is your first collection, forgive me, but I doubt you have a large following eager to devour thousands of your pages. For this reason, I would not go much past 99 pages.
Walt Whitman first published "Leaves of Grass" as a relatively small collection, but over the course of his life he expanded this.
A professor of mine published his first anthology of poems with 128 pages and 57 poems of varrying length.
My suggestion would be to keep it between 50 and 100 pages (give or take for title page and pictures, etc.) with an easy to read font size.
February 1st, 2010 at 10:52 pm
This really depends on how long each poem is, as well as personal taste. 99 poems sounds like a nice number, but how long does this make the anthology? Since this is your first collection, forgive me, but I doubt you have a large following eager to devour thousands of your pages. For this reason, I would not go much past 99 pages.
Walt Whitman first published "Leaves of Grass" as a relatively small collection, but over the course of his life he expanded this.
A professor of mine published his first anthology of poems with 128 pages and 57 poems of varrying length.
My suggestion would be to keep it between 50 and 100 pages (give or take for title page and pictures, etc.) with an easy to read font size.
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