Read More Poetry
.A conversation I had today pushed me briefly out of my organizational mode, in a good way. It started out about writing that inspires me to write, and that led me to talk about poetry I love.
Much of it is old, and much of it is poetry I first read years ago, which means I need to read more and expand my tastes a little. I find it hard to read poetry in the way I read fiction, and tend to read it a lot less. But I need to work on that.
Recommendations are welcome. In the meantime, I suspect that you need to read more poetry too, and here are some of my favorites:
“Ozymandias”, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hardly an original selection, but I love it, and it might be the first poem that I loved. I created an image based on its history some time ago.
“Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More “classic favorites”.
Many Yeats poems, including “The Second Coming”, “The Stolen Child”, “Easter, 1916″, and“Sailing to Byzantium”.
Many William Carlos Williams poems, including “The Rose” (which I also paid design homage to), “This Is Just To Say”, and “Spring and All”.
e. e. cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, which is the only poem on this list that I read for the first time recently. They should all be read out loud, but this one especially!
Hardly a comprehensive list, but if you haven’t read any of them before, follow those links… and if you have, re-reading probably won’t hurt either.
15 Jan 2007 at 06:41
A few current favourites:
“One Art”, Elizabeth Bishop.
“Days”, Phillip Larkin.
“Dublin” and “Snow”, Louis MacNeice.
“Let It Go” and “Missing Dates”, William Empson.
And almost anything by Eliot, but you knew that.