Poems and Poets

[Sven]

I've been reading a lot of poetry lately. I'm curious to know, those of you who are interested in and/or know much about poems and poets:

What are some of your favorite poems?
" " " " " " poets?

Recently, I've been much taken by Herbert and Donne and Eliot and Browning. I really like those English masters of meter, apparently. Browning's Last Duchess is way awesome:

[

Show Spoiler

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
the curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess's cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of you. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such a one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss
Or there exceed the mark"--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
the company below, then. I repeat
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine dowry will be disallowed
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

]

[Mara]

I like poetry fairly well. I'm not an expert.

The lesser-known poet I'm always trying to push is Wilfred Owen. Big fan. He died quite young in the trenches of WWI, and wrote mostly war poems, but they are amazing.

[Raiders]

A bit canonical, and likely due to my lack of exposure (I'm more of a prose man) but I've always been very much a Whitman guy.

...

N the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

[D_Davis]

I like Wendell Berry.



The Peace of the Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

[D_Davis]

And some of the stuff from Clark Ashton Smith

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/

[Adam]

Not too big on most poetry, but through my last couple years of high school, I did delve pretty far into a lot of the bigger names from the beat generation. A lot of it is oh so much silly and nonsensical wankery, but there are good ones, too. Allen Ginsberg was my favorite because his stuff always seemed relatively more urgent or purposeful and I dug that. Plus, he could be really funny. Actually, I'm using a gigantic paperback of collected Ginsberg poems right now as a mousepad

I don't know if I have one favorite Ginsberg work, because this book I've got has hundreds and hundreds of them tucked away. Here's one I like, though...

Night Gleam

Over and over thru the dull material world the call is made
over and over thru the dull material world I make the call
O English folk, in Sussex night, thru black beech tree branches
the full moon shone at three AM, I stood in underwear on the lawn -
I saw a mustached English man I loved, with athlete's breast and farmer's
arms,
I lay in bead that night many loves beating in my heart
sleepless hearing songs of generations electric returning intelligent memory
to my frame, and so went to dwell again in my heart
and worship the Lovers there, love's teachers, youths and poets who live
forever
in the secret heart, in the dark night, in the full moon, year after year
over & over thru the dull material world the call is made.

[monolith94]

About halfway through the 1st Canto of Don Juan by Lord Byron right now, and I'm enjoying it pretty well. It's very odd, as the tone veers from humorous to serious to satirical to achingly romantic all quite pell-mell. And the way he uses rhyme scheme and meter is funny, but sometimes can be almost aggravatingly rigid…

[Sven]

About halfway through the 1st Canto of Don Juan by Lord Byron right now, and I'm enjoying it pretty well. It's very odd, as the tone veers from humorous to serious to satirical to achingly romantic all quite pell-mell. And the way he uses rhyme scheme and meter is funny, but sometimes can be almost aggravatingly rigid…

I was going to pick this up soon. Thanks for the perspective.

[bac0n]

I tend to be most impressed with poets who can say powerful and profound things with common words. Among them, I consider poet Billy Collins to be without peer.

I also am a huge fan of Russell Edson, on account of his poems being so batshit crazy. I have a book of his poems here with me at work, which I crack open when I need a smile put on my face.

[Hugh_Grant]

Huge poetry fan here. I'll list some favorites when I have more time, but great idea for a thread.

[SpaceOddity]

I like poetry fairly well. I'm not an expert.

The lesser-known poet I'm always trying to push is Wilfred Owen. Big fan. He died quite young in the trenches of WWI, and wrote mostly war poems, but they are amazing.

Lesser known?!?! He's curriculum.

[Mara]

Lesser known?!?! He's curriculum.

Not anywhere I ever went. I was taught one poem of his once, Dulce et Decorum Est, in college, and went and bought a book of his poetry based on that.

[lovejuice]

I tend to be most impressed with poets who can say powerful and profound things with common words. Among them, I consider poet Billy Collins to be without peer.

he's my favorite too. it's kinda nice when you can quote one still alive poet. he did give a speech and read his poem at my high school. very inspiring.

[Hugh_Grant]

Many intro to lit courses include Owen on the syllabus, and "Dulce..." is in most anthologies. He's definitely one of my favorites. I also like Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry."

A sampling of my favorites:

"Root Cellar" -- Roethke
"Living in Sin" -- Rich
"Ballad of Birmingham" -- Randall
"Those Winter Sundays" -- Hayden
"To an Athlete Dying Young" -- A.E. Housman (He's probably my favorite.)
"Funeral Blues" -- Auden
"Ars Poetica" -- MacLeish
"Aubade" -- Larkin
"Traveling through the Dark" -- Stafford (tears me up every time)
"Mid-Term Break" -- Heaney
"Ex-Basketball Player" -- Updike (often paired with the Housman in anthologies)

[Duncan]

The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke is my favourite poetry collection, and maybe my favourite book.

Also love Arthur Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens.

David Berman (song writer of the now defunct Silver Jews) has a book of poetry called Actual Air that I think is pretty swell.

Really dig Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen, and Coleridge's later stuff.

[Melville]

I haven't read a lot of poetry, but my favorite poems are The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by E. Fitzgerald, The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, and The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. I also really like some of Baudelaire's stuff. Some of Keats', too, but only when read by Ben Whishaw.

[Hugh_Grant]

The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke is my favourite poetry collection, and maybe my favourite book.

My senior thesis compared/contrasted several translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies.

[Milky Joe]

stein, gertrude

dickinson, emily

yeats, w.b.

williams, william carlos

RUMI

others already mentioned (whitman)

[monolith94]

I really like "Home Burial" by Frost.

[Duncan]

My senior thesis compared/contrasted several translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Nice. I've read a couple translations in full, and various translations of a few of the elegies. Couldn't say which one I thought worked best though.

[Benny Profane]

Edward Snow or David Young?

Which is better?

[Mara]

I don't think anyone has mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is a bit of a favorite.

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

***

This is the one I find myself most often quoting, though:

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

[Hugh_Grant]

Oh! Forgot Hopkins' "God's Grandeur."

[Dead & Messed Up]

Big fan of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Edgar Allan Poe. Clearly not an imaginative poetry reader, but maybe I can fix that.

I'm reading and enjoying the Dhammapada. It's by this pretty cool guy, I don't know if anyone's heard of him...

...the BUDDHA.

[SpaceOddity]

For you film folk...

Frank O'Hara - Ave Maria

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies
get them out of the house so they won't
know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by
silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you
must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous
country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or
playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful
home
they will know where candy bars come
from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before
it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment
is in the Heaven on
Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made
the little
tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick
them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be
sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained
either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room hating you
prematurely since you won't have done
anything horribly mean
yet
except keeping them from life's darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this
advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in
front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn't let them see when
they were young