Ah Nigel, I heartily second you. A wonderful poem, making redundant all those OTHER public school memoirs about how beastly it was at Rugby, Charterhouse Repton etc etc.. You wonder why the ruling class continued to fork out so much to make their boy children so miserable. How lucky we are it never happened to us.

28. Richard Wilbur: The Beautiful Changes
 

Perhaps it's not his greatest book but I think one can't ignore the importance of its date: 1947. So shortly after the most destructive war of all times there comes into the world this book of poems of extraordinary grace (the word is the title of one of the best poems in the book) and beauty (and "Beautiful" is found in the title-poem, too - actually as a noun, as one discovers on reading the poem). And the grace and beauty are achieved not by the poet's averting his eyes from the horror but by responding directly to it; right at the beginning of the book we find a cluster of poems that come from the poet's direct experience as a combatant. They are some of the finest poems to come out of the Second World War.

And I, of course, can't resist a poem that turns my city into a verb: in the poem "Winter Spring", as he describes the effects of a momentary thaw on the landscape, we find the lines:

Now all this proud royaume
Is Veniced.

He may have broadened his range (or deepened his voice) after this book but his mastery of the seductive singing line was already there.

29. e.e. cummings, selected poems, ed. by R.S. Kennedy
 

Oh, uncle.

Having spent the better part of the day with Edward Estlin, and having (already) recognized that his lightning bolts occur fairly uniformly throughout the volumes, I must defer to the excellent “Selected” by Richard S. Kennedy, with its interesting biographical notes and examples of Cummings’s artwork.

Cummings wrote reams about love; love, and Spring, it seems, were his favorite topics. Death makes frequent appearances, but never morbidly, as sometimes in Dickinson, but as a reminder that our time on Earth is limited, that beauty abounds, that Spring comes every year, that sex is good and fun, and in sum, that life remains a blessing – and we can, in fact, bless.

I love, of course, love; but another aspect of Cummings that seduces me is his promotion of feeling, of emotions, above reason and logic, as the font of a breathing truth. I thought of the epigraph that Kierkegaard uses in Either / Or, and I paraphrase: “Is reason alone baptized, and are passions the pagans of the soul?” Cummings is not an irrationalist, but a diagnostician of what makes our time here a grateful dying (a verbing as he might say), rather than an unlived death (a nouning).

He knew how to work a metaphor. I often find myself slapped by surprise, at lines like this: “[her] hair, two fists of shrill color / clutched the dull volume of her tumbling face / scribbled with a big grin”; or how a star in the night sky “infinitesimally devours darkness”.

There is gobs more: the formal, cubist-inspired inventiveness; the neologisms and playfulness; the endless guises for the sonnet; the multiple orgasmic “Springsmelling intense large togethercolored instants” ; the contempt for ochlocracy (love that word), and esteem for the individual; the cherished prostitutes; and so many, many flowers. Cummings was a modernist – and a prolific, generally happy modernist, at that -- with the notable exception of his searing rage at war. He is so very rewarding to read.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Here: http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems...=e.e.+cummings

My Penguin selection of ee cummings, (selected by cummings himself) is 99 pages long, dated 1960 and priced at 3/6. I see it once belonged to T Mears, a hippyish student I knew at Oxford, so I must either have borrowed it from him and forgotten to return it, or stolen it. Sorry Terry.

Good call, Michael.

The cummings Selected ain't half bad as a selection. It has a good selection of the various cummings styles and modes, and I like that it doesn't stint on the short difficult ones where he creates mini poems within the poem via parentheses, as compared to the crowd-pleasers like the sexy sonnets and sweet sentimental ones (which I also like, by the way).

Best, Tony

The mention of poems within poems brings to mind a recent book by Fred Chappell. Shadow Box is made up of "inlaid" mostly formal poems. I've already made my two recommendations so I'm cheating here (sorry Tony) but it is an inventive volume that any formal poet should check out, imo. Maybe most of the poets here are already familiar with Shadow Box but if not Google Books allows you to read a few.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Hf6...page&q&f=false

30: Eugenio Montale - Le Occasioni (1939)
 

A plea for internationality. A toss up between this, Montales's second collection, and his first Ossi di Seppia, one of those century-changing first books to put aside Harmonium, Prufrock, Auden or Edward Thomas's Poems, but I couldn't do without La Casa dei Doganieri or Dora Markus, both poems many Italians know (at least partly) by heart. Both titles can easily be found on Abebooks, and in translation most handily in Jonathan Galassi's 'bilingual edition' of the Collected Poems. There is a famous, or infamous, according to taste, Robert Lowell translation of Dora Markus, and others of varying quality can be found on the net. Here is my own immodest attempt:

It was where the wooden pier at Porto Corsini
thrusts out into open sea
and solitary men, hardly seeming to move,
cast and retrieve their nets. With a vague hand
you gestured to your real country
on the other invisible shore,
and we followed the canal downtown
to the city docks in their sheen of soot
where a stagnant Spring ebbed away
unmourned.

And here where a sweet middle-eastern unease
perturbs the centuried calm,
your talk glittered like the scales
of their basketed catch.

Your restlessness recalls
those birds of passage that dash
against the harbour lighthouse
on hurricane nights:
tempestuous too your allure
that simmers without seeming
(and how rare its abeyance).
I don't understand how it is
you contrive to survive
in that lake of indifference, your heart.
Is it your talisman saves you,
– the one that you keep with your
nail-file, your lipstick, your powderpuff:
that miniature ivory mouse?
Is he your secret?!

Your translation of "Dora Markus" is arresting, Philip, with several dazzling metaphors. I had never seen the poem before.

I second your plea for internationality.

Where to start? Lorca? Jimenez? Szymborska? At least I know some names...yet there are whole regions of the world from which I'm pressed for even that. Good Lord, there's a big world out there -- so (thankfully) much still to read.

Re cummings, I recently read The Enormous Room. Now there's an underappreciated work. A link between Ishmael and ... whom? A model of humane, independent American honesty and manliness that should be taught in schools.

Williamb: If you esteem Fitzgerald's Odyssey so highly, you will certainly admire his Aeneid, which (with Lattimore's Iliad) I will add to the list as soon as Tony gets tired of waiting and allows the participants to continue filling the tally.

Yep, I've got his Aeneid, also the Vintage soft-cover. Loved it. What I should do is see about getting both books in hardcover! Lattimore's Iliad I haven't tried, but I have Fitzgerald's version on Anchor, which I haven't read all the way through, but which I like well enough.

At the far end of the enormous room
An orchestra is playing for the rich.

Magpie Auden at it again. But what a couplet!

31. Timothy Steele: Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems
 

In the mid-1980’s, there were few folks under 40 years of age writing metrical poetry, doing it well, and getting away with it—certainly not here in California. Timothy Steele's Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (a strong follow-up to his 1979 first book Uncertainties and Rest) and Vikram Seth’s verse novel The Golden Gate, both published in 1986, showed that there was a bright future and a way forward (outside pop music) for writing that included meter and rhyme as part of the sound system. (Seth found a sympathetic advisor and friend in Steele early in his writing career and dedicated The Golden Gate to Steele, who returned the compliment. Steele’s dedication of Sapphics to Seth is a tetrameter sonnet in the same form as all the stanzas in Seth’s book.)

Beyond its importance to metrical poetry in the late 20th century, Sapphics not only includes individual poems worthy of the anthologies (the wise title poem “Sapphics Against Anger,” the sparkling love lyric “An Aubade,” a sonnet “The Skimming Stone” about a friend who died prematurely), but also holds together as a unified whole with recurring themes. The last line of Steele’s prior book Uncertainties ended with a focus on the immediate present—“Right now. Right here.” In Sapphics, whether describing everyday scenes of life in L.A., or reflecting on artistic and literary sources as diverse as David Copperfield and Last Tango in Paris, Steele keeps returning to a quiet appreciation of the present moment, and to the ways in which preoccupation with past losses or the “chartering of hopes” for an unrealistic future can sidetrack that.

Here’s a link to Amazon’s page for this book, reprinted in one volume with Uncertainties and Rest under the joint title Sapphics and Uncertainties.

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphics-uncer...+uncertainties

There’s a link on the same web page to Steele’s later book Toward the Winter Solstice--his finest book, I think--but it falls outside Tony’s parameters for this “20th Century” list, since it was published in 2006. However, Winter Solstice includes a host of vivid and varied poems and will surely merit a place on the list of best ”21st Century” poetry books, when we (or someone else) gets to that.

Best, Bruce

Good pick, Bruce. Even as late as the mid 1990s, finding Sapphics and Uncertainties -- the reissued double volume -- in the bookstore was a meaningful event for me. I'd have put Toward the Winter Solstice in myself, but as you said it came after the century ended. I considered both The Color Wheel and S & U, but I think you made the right pick.

By the way, my other pick would have been E. A. Robinson's Children of the Night but it was published before the century began. And here we are 31 titles in and still no Robinson. I think Frank Osen suggested a selected back in the thread somewhere. Anyone...?

David R.

Yes, thanks for the Tim Steele nomination. Take a look at James Matthew Wilson's remarkable, far-reaching Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, published earlier this year by Story Line Press.

Bill, I'm not familiar with the book you mentioned on Steele, but I'll look for it.

David, I agree that The Color Wheel is a fine collection, too, with some memorable poems ("Eros," "Walking Her Home," "Woman in a Museum," etc.) And you're right that Robinson should be on the list. (And, I think, Jeffers, Dylan Thomas, Houseman, and even Bob Dylan, though he famously said he wasn't a poet, but more of a trapeze artist.) But for my second pick, I'm thinking of another Californian.

32. Kim Addonizio: Tell Me
 

Many of the books on this list achieve their effects by indirection and reserve, veiled meanings and metaphors. Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me (published in 2000, just under the wire for a “20th Century” list) is a good reminder that sometimes the best way to say something is to come right out and say it--especially if you can say it so well and with such burning immediacy.

Some of the most arresting poems in Tell Me (“Glass,” “Collapsing Poem,” "The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision”) derive their power from the voice of an initially “objective” narrator who gradually is drawn into the poem’s situation and starts to lose control…and then pulls the reader in, too. But the poet herself never loses control of the material. This stuff is really hard to pull off convincingly, requiring craft both in phrasing and in walking an emotional tightrope. But Addonizio does it repeatedly.

There is a wide range of subject matter in Tell Me (often presented with an honesty that can shock, but not for the sake of shocking), all grounded in things real people care about—too many problems and too much drink (“Glass”); the world’s maddening and eerie mixture of evil with beauty (“Theodicy”); a mother and daughter, both prone to depression, making a non-suicide pact (“The Promise”); the wish that death will “pass over” a loved one (“Prayer”); the very human yearning to feel and experience life fully, and damn the consequences (“For Desire”); a lyrical imagining of long-ago lives, triggered during a walk by the ocean (“At Moss Beach”).

A great book.

Here’s a link to the Amazon page for Tell Me:

http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Me-Americ...ywords=tell+me

Best, Bruce

Bruce -- I haven't in the past been much of a fan of Addonizio's poems. Maybe I'll give her another day in court with this book. That is one of the good things about a thread like this.

David R.

Yes, Robinson definitely belongs on the list. I'm hoping someone'll nominate Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, J.C. Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, all hugely important; as well as Spender, Empson, and MacNeice, across the pond.

And Edgar Lee Masters. His Spoon River Anthology was all in free verse, but he wrote a lot of fine verse in traditional forms. Very under-read and underrated.

Spender? Spener is an overrated twit. Name a single good poem the old fool wrote. Empson and MacNeice Yes, sure. But Sir Stephen Spender? A comic figure. Roy Campbell supposedly hung him out of a window and Campbell was quite right. And a much better poet to boot,

No offense, John, but Spender was a very fine poet.

And the rules change!
 

Hi All,

Yes, okay, I did in the end get tired of waiting, and responding to calls I hereby change the rules.

As of now, each poster can nominate up to 5 books for the list. With current posters, that might get us to 100, I hope!

When we're done, I was thinking of cutting out the commentary and putting the whole list together as one document.

Best, T

33. Renascence, and Other Poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay
 

I don't think an explanation is called for.

34. Hugh MacDiarmid A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
 

OK, Tony. Providing you don't chuck it out for language reasons, this MacDiarmid masterpiece for all the reasons I've already given. Oh - and add to the list of languages from which there are translations in the body of the work - Italian as well.

There are plenty of the modern paperback around on Amazon etc. but try AbeBooks or such for the lovely little pocket-size hardback published in 1962 in an edition by The 200 Burns Club of Edinburgh with David Daiches nicely judged essay in the Appendix B. Quite an act of homage considering the poet's blistering accounts of Burns Clubs in general!

35. Portraits and Elegies - Gjertrud Schnackenberg
 

Great thread. I was about to nominate Timothy Steele - Sapphics and Uncertainties - Poems 1970-1986, but saw that he was already selected.

Schnackenberg is a brilliant metrical poet. This can also be purchased as part of Supernatural Love.

36. The Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore
 

As promised. Thanks, Tony.

There is a taut compression to Lattimore's Iliad that provides an archaic flavor to the non-reader of Greek and creates an atmosphere of combustible energy. Some prefer it to the more recent translations. Hector's prophecy to Andromache is especially good.

I can't make up my mind, what with only two votes. If I don't dawdle until it is too late, it will be a woman poet, for sure. Schnackenberg was on my short list, but now that is taken care of. My alltime, top of the list, best ever is undoubtedly Lattimore's Illiad. I do wish everyone hadn't been given five votes. The interest here is greater than one might think. It isn't easy to select two out of the gazillion books available.

37. Selected Poems by E. J. Pratt
 

Edwin John Pratt is perhaps the most important Canadian poet of the 20th century. He began by writing ballads and lyrics about his native Newfoundland (the gems “The Ice Floes” and “Newfoundland” are highly readable today). He then tried to out-Eliot Eliot with the quatrains of “From Stone to Steel” and “The Prize Cat,” then turned to writing free verse and long blank verse narratives about Canadian history. The most notable of the narratives are “Brébeuf and His Brethren,” about a French-Canadian priest who is captured and tortured by Natives, and “Toward the Last Spike,” about the construction of a trans-Canada railway.

I should also mention that he was a friend and colleague of Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto.

As a sample, here’s the ending to “The Ice-Floes,” about a seal hunting expedition that ended in tragedy:

And the rest is as a story told
. . . Or a dream that belonged to a dim, mad past,
Of a March night and north wind’s cold,
. . . Of a voyage home with a flag half-mast;
Of twenty thousand seals that were killed
. . . To help to lower the price of bread;
Of the muffled beat . . . of a drum . . . that filled
. . . A nave . . . at our count of sixty dead.

38. Collected Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 

I am fond of my Penguin Selected, edited by Robert Faggen, and I am sure both the Mezey and Donaldson collections are good, but I am putting in the Collected because it contains all of Children of the Night and because its original edition in 1922 won Robinson his first of three Pulitzers. Here's an amazon link, and here is a link to read it online at Bartelby.com.

David R.

Bill, I am glad you put Lattimore's Illiad on the list -- a masterpiece.

David R.

Hear hear for E.J. Pratt! I read long patches from Brebeuf to my friends on a trip to the Boundary Waters. We didn't run into any Hurons, but we did have a priest along.

I should say I learned of Pratt thanks to Edward's on-line essay on him. Bill

39. The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor van den Heuvel
 

This anthology was groundbreaking when it first appeared in the early 1970s as exhibit A in the case to take contemporary, English-language haiku seriously. Though other excellent anthologies have emerged since then -- some with arguably better claims to breadth or inclusiveness -- each edition of The Haiku Anthology has managed to successfully reassert its status as the indispensable standard-bearer. It remains the one to start with, and the one to get if you can only get one.

Here is a purchase link.

(If this is not allowed because it is an anthology, I will take it back.)

David R.

Clarification: 2000 was the final year of the 20th Century, right?

David R.

David, I assume that if years 1-100 are the "1st Century," then years 1901-2000 are the "20th Century," and so I think you're fine suggesting something from the year 2000. (I wouldn't be in a position to criticize anyway, since I suggested a title from that year.)

In any case, you have me intrigued as to what book from 2000 you were going to suggest. (For the heck of it, I'll guess it's the one by Wilbur.)

Best, Bruce

40. Elephant Rocks by Kay Ryan
 

Ryan's distinctive style may have emerged in the poems of the previous volume, Flamingo Watching, but it was perfected with mastery in Elephant Rocks. Part Stevie Smith, part Emily Dickinson, part Marianne Moore, a dash of William Blake, and all Kay Ryan, that style is a feat itself -- compressed but expansive, terse but aerated, wry but warm, all achieved through masterful craftsmanship employing easy-flowing meter, clever and surprising rhymes, and uncanny line breaks.

I considered using my final selection on her subsequent volume, Say Uncle, but I think Elephant Rocks is the right choice because, as I said, she really perfected her style with it, and because it contains so many great poems -- "A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water," "Crib," "How Birds Sing," "Outsider Art," "Living With Stripes," "A Cat/A Future," and on and on.

Amazon link here.

David R.

(Bruce -- Say Uncle was the 2000 publication I was considering. The shameful truth is that, while I have great respect for his undeniable talent, Wilbur has never grabbed me. There, I said it.)

#41 I H Finlay The Dancers Inherit the Party
 

I've always known that the real reason I like poetry is because I am lazy about reading. Even when I go back to novels I loved when I was younger (Nevil Shute, Olivia Manning) - the story runs so very slowly.

I have no attention span. I can manage Laurence Sterne or Heinrich Böll - but really I want poetry.

Even then, I don't want poems I need to reread. I want short things that give me an immediate hit, and which I can readily memorise and replay when I am out walking. I like one-word poems, even no-word poems like the Fisches Nachtgesang over on the Poetry Appreciation thread. Like most reluctant readers, I want it short.

Many of I H Finlay's poems are really sculptures: inscribed paving slabs, or sundials with fancy mottoes. You hardly need to read those at all.

But I adore his tiny book of very short poems The Dancers Inherit the Party. The title poem alone (which is even better than its title) does more for me than entire books of more serious poetry. There are so many different kinds of poems (strictform, freeverse, keens, squibs, surrealist homilies) that even turning the pages is an adventure.

I also love the way that one of Scotland's most uncompromising modernists is also a poet of the islands.

Poet

At night, when I cannot sleep,
I count the islands
And I sigh when I come to Rousay
-- My dear black sheep.

It is as if Finlay doesn't care about schools or loyalties. He knows what is to say, and simply selects the swiftest route.

......

'Buying' Ian Hamilton Finlay's work is problematic in some respects.

But you could start here:

http://www.poets.org/sponsor-book-pr...prmBookID/1015

Bravo - for a poet too easily discarded from this list precisely because of the difficulty and variety of his - what shall one say?... formats... styles... manners? - not to say locations. A splendid recommendation which I'd second most heartily.

I've just ordered it from interlibrary loan. I've benefited before from Mr. O'Neill's recommendations, most notably Artorius.

It's so wonderful to meet other fans, and potential fans, of Finlay's odd approach to poetry.

Late in the 1970's (when I was living in London) I had the spectacular good fortune to visit an 'event' version of the Finlay / Clark Battle of Midway.

The seven combattant aircraft carriers are represented by live beehives in an approximate echo of the actual orientation, with the sea between replaced with rose standards in planters. The whole thing is housed in a pro-tem conservatory (as it needs to be, there are bees all over the place).

I'm not normally a fan of conceptual art, but Midway is unforgettable.

After you've been in there for quite a long time, you notice that some of the hives have a single joss-stick smoking next to them. Those are the carriers which were fired, and lost.

It is embarrassing to cry in public; but sometimes it is worth it.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/...idway-i-p07932

Off-topic but what the heck. All's fair in love and literature threads.

These come immediately to mind. Just want to say I love Olivia's Balkan triology and Nevile's A Town Named Alice.

I'm still thinking about my poetry contributions though.

At some stage I read the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy back to back. I don't think I could do that these days.

Nevile Shute for me was mainly On the Beach, though I have fond memories of Requiem for a Wren.

A Town Like Alice was a book I couldn't warm to because my father kept telling me how fine it was.