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Unread 10-06-2009, 03:43 AM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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Location: Venice, Italy
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A good list, Chris, though I would substitute "Ode to Autumn" for "Grecian Urn". It's a rare example of a poem that strikes me as having all those qualities of exquisite formal symmetry, as Richard calls it, superb suggestive power and total appropriateness of diction, imagery, sensuality and sense. So maybe that's English literature's perfect poem. It's tragic but maybe also inevitable that it was (with one or two minor exceptions) Keats's last poem. Where do you go after perfection?

But then again maybe perfection is the wrong thing to be looking for in a poem.
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