By all means, Andrew, put in something by Celan officially. I thought about it, but I don't feel competent to explain or discuss him. (Does anybody?)

I feel the same way about Neruda. I keep thinking Canto General should be in a list of best books of the 20th century, but I'd rather have someone who reads Spanish and knows Spanish-language poetry make that call. I know Neruda, like Celan, only a little and mostly in English (though I can pick through Celan's German a little).

Now if I can just decide how I feel about Geoffrey Hill, who does write in English, just an English hardly anyone understands...

Pat

I think Conrad Aiken's Preludes and Tristan Tzara's Absolute Man belong on the list, but I don't have my copies handy and so can't extemporize at the moment.

Nemo

This was not an "official" criterion for nominations, although I think a lot of us wanted to find books that met this standard, that our selections be good as books. I'm struck by how difficult this was to achieve, how rarely this ideal is reached. Even the Frost selections I recall being chosen for which individual poems they contained. Frost certainly wrote books that have gems mixed in with lesser ores.

Somehow we need the poems to cooperate in the effect they produce as a group, though some tend to stand out as greater than others, just as within a single poem particular lines or phrases stand out, but we still want the poem to do something taken as a whole. (Nicholson Baker's anthologist, I recall, imagines going in the opposite direction, collecting single words from poems he loves.)

Anyway, food for thought. I can think of books that achieve Frost's ideal, but now I'm not sure if it's truly so rare, or if it's that I read books much differently than I read poems...

Pat

That's the way I was viewing my choices, Patrick, although the end result was usually thus book length poems. I think a poet who was very good at molding his 'collections' is Thom Gunn: each of his books seems to me to have a distinct shape.

Nemo

[i]Hi All,

First off, Barbara, would you please edit your post to make your choice # 73, not 72? That'll help the math.

Second, ,Nigel asks:

- I don't think this point was covered in your original - or revised - 'rules' for this thread, but is it really intended that there should be more than one book of any given poet on the list? Rilke is now in twice and Phillip's last choice is trailing the notion of additional Eliot.. where would this stop? I feel that the spirit of the original, which was about individual books of poetry, is already getting lost with a number of 'collecteds/completes/selecteds' and it is going to be further diluted by adding extra items from well-known 'big' names - with the door now also apparently open to any language in translation. It's your thread so can we have a 'ruling' please?

My feeling is that rules, like rulers, are made to be overthrown when they oppress. If the Spanish king is off in Africa secretly poaching endangered elephants, do away with the silly notion of royalty and let the silly royals go get a job like the rest of us. The same applies to my rules: if a poet is so terrific at crafting books that he or she MUST be in twice, so be it. If a poet in translation is so amazing that the damage the poem suffers in transmission isn't enough to keep him or her from the list, so be it.

I will say that, yes, this thread is meant to highlight great books of poetry, not great poets who perhaps never wrote a great, unified, amazing book (as compared to some wonderful poems thrown in with lots of bathos and junk, so you have to pick the good stuff out of the mess).

Thanks, TB

Great thread, Tony. 'Been enjoying it!

In defense of those who suggested 5 titles, though, you're actually the one who set the limit at 5. (See post 101, top of page 11.)

But who's counting?

Best, Bruce

Hi Brian,

My brain is getting very leaky, obviously! Okay, five it is. I'll revise my earlier post to stave off confusion.

Thanks, TB

I hope someone will post Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate!

73. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
 

All right then.

Because it re-opened the field for narrative poetry. Because it works as a novel, as a poem, as a meditation on life, on love, on death, on San Francisco, on wine, on animals... Because the metre and rhymes are handled so with such deftness and lightness. Because I have read it countless times and always found new things to enjoy in it...

Thanks, Gregory. Now I have to reread it!

PS. That is #74.

I have been waffling on the whole collected/selected vs. individual volume issue. I get the argument for the individual slim volume, and I am a fan of a well put together volume. But, when I go back to my offending entries -- the Robinson Complete, the Hugo collected, and the Haiku Anthology -- I have trouble making the switch.

The trouble comes from a personal and emotional connection to the books, and I think that is what the thread was calling for. I came to Hugo, for example, through this collected. And though it is long, I read through it like a novel. There were "chapters" -- individual volumes -- that were marvelous, and could easily be entered on this list, but the whole book was what "wowed" me. The Haiku Anthology is even easier for me to defend -- it was a revelation to me as a reader and would be haiku poet, and there is no alternative to it.

Robinson is more complicated. I came to Robinson through selecteds and collecteds before I knew what his individual book were. My impulse to pick "Children of the Night" was because of its "importance" more than any personal experience with it, which I think is one of the worries about picking selecteds and collecteds. But it is the poems from that volume and several others, plus the later long works -- some of which Nemo mentioned -- that cumulatively hooked me. The Complete Poems holds them all.

So, I am sticking with what I entered.

David R.

#74 Douglas Dunn, Elegies
 

Douglas Dunn's talent for elegy was announced in his first collection, Terry Street (1969), in what has since become one of his most famous poems:

A Removal from Terry Street

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U S Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

First published in 1985, Elegies is a collection of 39 poems that express Dunn's love for, and grief at the premature death of, his wife Lesley, an artist, who died in 1981 and to whom the book is dedicated.

It might seem to someone who has not read the collection but who knows something about its genesis that Elegies would be a somewhat depressing read. But that is simply not the case. Not surprisingly, some of the poems are melancholic, even sad. But the whole collection is uplifting and very, very moving.

This is the first poem in the collection, apparently written before any inkling of impending doom:


Re-reading Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and Other Stories

A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze,
Has waited here between page 98
And 99, in the story called "Bliss",
Since the summer of '62, its date,

Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose
Fly, what can "Je ne parle pas francais" mean
To you who died in Scotland, when I closed
These two sweet pages you were crushed between?

Here is a green bus ticket for a week
In May, my place mark in "The Dill Pickle".
I did not come home that Friday. I flick
Through all our years, my love, and I love you still.

These stories must have been inside my head
That day, falling in love, preparing this
Good life; and this, this fly, verbosely buried
In "Bliss", one dry tear punctuating "Bliss".


Here's a later one:

The Kaleidoscope

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

There are eight formal sonnets in this collection. Dunn has only written a handful of sonnets since, and a couple of these are hark-backs to the theme of Elegies.

The collection won The Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ian Gregson's assessment of Elegies (in "There are many worlds': The 'Dialogic' in Terry Street and After", from Reading Douglas Dunn Edited by Robert Crawford & David Kinloch, Edinburgh 1992)
is worth quoting in full:

"In the case of love and death - the central themes of Elegies - the relationship between self and other is obviously paramount, and this collection is so powerful because of the way love and death are constantly reassessed by the movement from the poet's perspective to that of the dying wife and back, and into that of friends and even casual bystanders. There was a precedent for this in poems like 'The Haunter' by the profoundly novelised poet Thomas Hardy, but the poems in Elegies are more open-ended than Hardy's; there is much more suggestion in Dunn's poems that the single perspective is vulnerable, open to question. 'There are many worlds', and that of the dying is only one of them and mingles frighteningly, grotesquely but also matter-of-factly with that of the living. Such mingling of worlds produces both mutual bafflement and potential enrichment; it is edgy but fraught with imaginative possibilities."

I very much agree about the Collected Robinson, David. His later work is much neglected, and in the Collected Poems it is clear how vital it is to the arc of his work as a whole: its oft criticized repetitiveness, those endless permutations of theme & dynamic come to seem more of an increasing refinement of insights into a very basic obsessive human condition...then at the end, with the startling Amaranth, he bursts out of the mold before coasting to a halt in King Jasper. The Collected also contextualizes the mythic Arthurian books well, first humanizing myth, and then, with the more contemporary pieces emerging out of them, quietly mythologizing the human & the mundane. The patient rigor behind his willingness to go on and on at such length (I think most of those final poems had their own year of work devoted to them, at MacDowell) is inspiring to me--and the reasons for it would not be apparent without the fullness of that volume. It inspired a patience in reading as well: I devoted most of a year to reading the book cover to cover, and heard no clock ticking over my shoulder.

Nemo

That's a fascinating light you throw on Robinson, Nemo. I confess I've never tackled the long later poems and now you've convinced me that I must.

Read them all together!

Nemo

I'm glad to see more about Dunn from you, Duncan. When I was in my local used bookstore recently, I found a copy of his selected put out by Faber. I wouldn't have known a thing about him but for the wonderful poem you put up in the appreciation thread. Thanks for leading me to him.

Pat

#75 D. H. Lawrence, Last Poems.
 

Only in Wallace Stevens is it possible to find such sustained and elegant meditations on death. During my teaching years, I read 'The Ship Of Death' aloud to people ranging in age 18 to 98, and each time was rewarded and renewed by the look on each face.

'Birds, Beasts and Flowers' is another glorious book which I might have selected here but for the fact that 'The Ship Of Death' is one of the truly great 20th century poems. Lawrence's Collected Poems is, for me, an essential volume.

And because I am so well-used to the disdain Lawrence inspires, having been spat on both literally and figuratively for his sake many times, and because my deep regard for Lawrence has changed my life in many ways at many times (see my poem 'Thirroul' published in The Hudson Review this year), I offer this much-loved poem by another poet who could easily get a look-in here, Tony Hoagland, instead of one from Lawrence's Last Poems.

I wish I had written this poem.


Lawrence

On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name

the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”

It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people

don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”

Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far

in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more

than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.

Yo Kali!
I don't know this Hoagland fellow but in honor of such a fiery and exciting poem I shall move Lawrence up to the top of my learning pile.

Gyps?!

Yo Ho Ho is coming - ask for the D. H. L. Collected Poems for Christmas! I PhD'd on him. Read, and if you want to, we can talk. I have words to say!

As for Hoagland, try THIS ONE. I love it.

P.Ssst - If the 'rant' poem isn't a genre, it should be! Let's Rant!!!

Cally,

Despite my abiding respect for you, I am not a fan of Lawrence. But I do like Hoagland. I think his best work is post-20th Century, though, so maybe he's not right for this list. (Andrew, try this one.)

But since this list is an inspiration, and it is you, I might give DHL another try.

David R.

Ah, darling David Ahh! I thought of you dearly yesterday as we drove through San Francisco, wishing I had time to call you, to talk.

I don't ask that anyone like him. But I wish I had just one hour with ANYONE to try to show you what he meant/means to me. I have such stories!

I don't ask that you like him. But in a list like this, to leave Lawrence out would be a travesty. He is a MEGALITH of the 20th century, whether any of us like it or not.

Let me quote you a moment from Kenneth Rexroth's introduction to Lawrence's Selected:

"Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition."

I have a feeling I have not written the last of Lawrence. There is a REASON, and an UNreason, AHhh, why someone you like, like Hoagland, feels as he does about D. H. Lawrence.

No-one has to like him. But no-one should spit on him. His place in our literature, and the venom and condescension he inspires continue to astound me. I cannot imagine what my life would have been if I had not found him.

As I said to Gypsy Boy, let's talk, you and me, if you like.

Cal

My admiration for Lawrence grows and grows. When you read the complete poems, you find a lot of works that are really a sort of philosophy chopped up in lines, but the best poems, which is how we customarily judge our poets, are just magnificent—beautiful and true and utterly without cant.

Writers who admired Lawrence include W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin—no slouches there, either.

Rexroth's introduction to his selection of poems by Lawrence is also Rexroth at his best, and is well worth reading.

I have encountered a lot of snobbish rejection of Lawrence from people who have not read him at length—usually people steeped in New Critical ideals, and the same people who dismiss Jeffers.

But certain great poets—Blake, Lawrence, Jeffers—need to be read differently than certain prim perfectionists. They demand a different kind of reading. It seems to me they require a deeper sort of reading.

Dave

I would like to nominate one book and question some others.

Am I right in thinking that Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" has not yet been nominated?

Also, is the year 2000 considered 20th Century? That's the year of Kim Addonizio's "Tell Me." Pardon my ignorance of calendars...

Am I right in thinking we should not nominate "Collected Poems" volumes as has been done with WC Williams?

Just wonderin'.

Cally,

Don't worry, I feel no obligation to like him. I am grateful that my poetry education, from the start, has been utterly haphazard and idiosyncratic, leaving me with a fairly strong immunity to feeling obliged to like anything.

Another near miss! (Or near hit, depending on how you look at it.)

Pound and Eliot are "megaliths" too, but I don't care much for either.

I like Rexroth as a critic and commentator, more so than as a poet or translator, but I love Hardy. I also love Blake, but I can take or leave Yeats. So I am not sure what to make of this quote.

No spitting or venom here. What I have read so far simply hasn't moved me. But, I'll give him another day in court.

David R.

Not sure about the Auden book, but I think we settled on 2000 as the last year of the century, ans the issue of nominating collecteds has been discussed throughout the thread at some length.

David R.

No slight against Lawrence or Stevens, but L.E. Sissman did an amazing job of standing up to death in his last collected poems, Hello Darkness. Donald Hall and his wife Jane Kenyon famously wrote on the subject and accomplished very moving work. Across the pond, George Barker wrote many elegies. I'm surprised Hall, Kenyon and Barker haven't come up yet. And Sissman was no slouch, writing in his consistently polished rhymed couplets or blank verse.

76. A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
 

I am using my fifth and final choice to continue in the direction of expansion of thought and craft. Though an individual poet can influence a fellow poet to develop the craft it is more imperative (IMO) to have access to many writers especially those outside one's language limits.

I have already submitted an anthology in my agenda of broadening the scope 51. These are not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women

Tony has listed 15. Modern European Poetry, edited by Willis Barnstone and though I am sorely tempted to add "A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now" (editors Aliki and Willis Barnstone), because of the special focus on women poets over the borders of time and national borders which might be encouraging to all whose voice is drowning in a flooding of male perspectives (yes, there is often a discernible difference) I have decided to go for broke and suggest as 76. A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

As the editor says in his introduction: I have always felt that a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry, of that in his own language and also that of world poetry. Thinking about that estate, such as it is at the present moment, I decided I could contribute to its possessions provided, however, that instead of theory, I brought to it something of practice. (...)

My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable, and to use a compromised term, realist, that is loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. Thus they undermine the widely held opinion that poetry is a misty domain eluding understanding.

If I had to chose only one book of poetry to take with me to solitary confinement on a desert island or elsewhere, knowing I would never be allowed to leave that place or have any communication with anyone outside it, I would chose an anthology, perhaps not this one for I'd want a little mystery as well as realism, but it would certainly be an anthology rather than a single poet. (But the collected works of William Shakespeare would be my choice if the rules included drama.)

Now I have spent the last of my voting capital, every sou, but am the richer for this thread.

Thx again, Tony, for initiating the thread.

77. Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
 

Few poets have written poems that celebrate the exuberance of being alive more than Frank O'Hara. Whitman of course comes to mind and without getting into a comparison of O'Hara and Whitman it can be said both of them wrote poems that sweat on the page. In regards to form O'Hara is an example of what FV can do at its best. But the most important thing about O'Hara is that he's fun to read. I'm sure everyone is familiar with his work to some extent but here is one of the most famous poems from Lunch Poems.


A STEP AWAY FROM THEM

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, è bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.

There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872860353?tag=poetsorg-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativ eASIN=0872860353&adid=0099A08WGS1M4KSQAYXC&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poets.org%2Fviewmedia.php% 2FprmMID%2F5970

Good call, John. And speaking of Pierre Reverdy... !

Nemo

I have a selection of Reverdy published by Wake Forest University Press but no single volume and I don't read French. Hopefully someone who does is a Reverdy fan.

Yeah, Nemo, do you know anybody who is a Reverdy fan? :)

Janice,

Good call on A Book Luminous Things. I found my way to the T'ang Dynasty in that book, and it introduced me to a lot of poets I would not likely had paid attention to (Raymond Carver, Anna Swir, and Szymborska, to name a few). Plus, Milosz's commentary is clear, illuminating, and utterly unpretentious. The book is about as humane a teaching document as you can find.

David R.

(By the way -- I am looking forward to adding the Latina Women anthology to my collection of Latino anthologies. If I had more than five votes, I might have included one of those.)

Thanks again, Tony, for hosting this party. I look forward to when you collate a single list. Thanks, Nigel, for the Summoned By Bells recommendation. It was a real treat. What solid, inventive, unpretentious blank verse, and understatement of the main statement: that wisdom wasn't cramming for exams, "But humble love for what we sought and knew." And thanks, Janice, for calling my attention to Luminous Things, which I have neglected on the shelf for years. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

78 William Soutar - Poems in Scots
 

Like many others, I suspect, I have been agonising on my last choice - torn several ways but especially between, on the one hand, the concentration and eloquence in miniature of this masterpiece and, on the other, one of the great poetic pieces of dramatic writing of the last hundred years, Dylan Thomas's magical Under Milk Wood. In the end, however, I knew where I had to stand for Thomas will have many admirers - surely someone will propose his play - but few will know Soutar, especially at his tight, yet moving, best.

In 1935, amidst the minor storms of the 'Scottish literary renaissance' and the complacency of a government so coldly remote from ordinary lives, especially in the carefully labelled "Distressed Areas", the young but bed-ridden Soutar fashioned a poetry that ranged from sweet natural observation to the ambitions of his people. I've read from this to students and children, to partners and politicos, in times of happiness and of the greatest distress, and this gem of a collection always really speaks. Try the beautifully observed and evoked minor moments of the natural world in such poems as "The Gowk" (cuckoo), "At Tibbermuir" or "Evening Star"; then there are the deeply triste resonances of "Fear", "The Tryst" and right at the end of this wonderfully crafted collection "Song"; the reflective notes of "The Dark Lowe" and, no satelite images of earth available or even imagined, the remarkable "Indifference". Yet there was also space in these 46 pages for the more contentious and lengthy (15 pages) of, "The Auld Tree", a tribute to MacDiarmid and a contribution to the literay conflicts of the day.

In my past posts, I have refrained, as most have, from lengthy quotation but, since this volume is indeed hard to find (though many of its works are reprinted in the Canongate Selected edition) and the one copy that I've found on the net is £25 from a seller on Abe Books, this time I'm going to give two works for members to savour.

First, as a sample of his concentrated lyricism,

"Fear"

Aince in the mornin' early,
The mornin' o' the year,
I dug deep doun intill the yird
And happit a' my fear.

I happit owre my fractious fear
And cried: "Lie laich ye fule:"
But whan aince mair I gaed that gate
I heard the leaves o' dule.

I heard the chunnerin' leaves o' dule
And wudna bide to hear:
But when aince mair I gaed that gate
I saw the frucht o' fear.

I saw the heavy frucht o' fear
Sae mindfu' o' my youth:
And raxin' up a desolate hand
I gather'd in my ruth.

And lastly, a piece of what I'd call magical nationalism which is lit with the flair of legend; it is called

"Birthday"

There were three men o' Scotland
Wha rade intill the nicht
Wi' nae mune lifted owre their crouns
Nor onie stern for licht:

Nane but the herryin' houlet,
The broun mouse, and the taed,
Kent whan their horses clapper'd by
And whatna road they rade.

Nae man spak tae his brither,
Nor ruggit at the rein;
But drave straucht on owre burn and brae
Or half the nicht was gaen.

Nae man spak tae his brither,
Nor lat his hand draw in;
But drave straucht on owre ford and fell
Or nicht was nearly dune.

There came a flaucht o' levin
That brocht nae thunner ca'
But left ahint a lanely lowe
That wudna gang awa.

And richt afore the horsemen,
Whaur grumly nicht had been,
Stude a' the Grampian Mountains
Wi' the dark howes atween.

Up craigie cleuch and corrie
They rade wi' stany soun',
And saftly thru the lichted mirk
The switherin' snaw cam doun.

They gaed by birk and rowan,
They gaed by pine and fir;
Aye on they gaed or nocht but snaw
And the roch whin was there.

Nae man brac'd back the bridle
Yet ilka fute stood still
As thru the flichterin' floichan-drift
A beast cam doun the hill.

It steppit like a stallion,
Wha's heid haud's up a horn,
And weel the men o' Scotland kent
It was the unicorn.

It steppit like a stallion,
Snaw-white and siller-bricht,
And on its back there was a bairn
Wha' low'd in his ain licht.

And baith gaed by richt glegly
As day was at the daw;
And glisterin' owre hicht and howe
They saftly smool'd awa.

Nae man but socht his brither
And look't him in the e'en,
And sware that he wud gang a' gates
To cry what he had seen:

There were three men o' Scotland
A' frazit and forforn;
But on the Grampian Mountains
They saw the unicorn.

And for any who find their way to the original edition (Moray Press, 1935) there is an excellent glossary as well.

Like Bill, I look forward to final collated list - and congratulations again to Tony for his brilliant concept in the first place.

Best to all - and especially for Thanksgiving,
Nigel

I thought the attached list might be of some interest - it was sent by the Italian offshoot of the secondhand book site Abebooks, and is supposed to be an attempt at listing the best 100 books ever. Not a very good one, obviously, with a ridiculous bias towards the modern and several risible choices that most of us would not put in the best 100 books of their year, but it's depressing to see that not one (unless I missed it) book of 20th century poetry was included by a panel (presumably - it has the look of something compiled with increasing alcohol levels by a group of office employees down the pub) that would appear to have contained at least one educated suggester.
(Titles in Italian of course, but they are easy enough to guess)

100 Best Books of all time, according to Abebooks (Italia)

1984, George Orwell
Cent'anni di solitudine, Gabriel García Márquez
Delitto e castigo, Fedor Dostoevskij
L'Odissea, Omero
A sangue freddo, Truman Capote
Guerra e pace, Lev Tolstoj
Il ritratto di Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Don Chisciotte, Miguel de Cervantes
Grandi speranze, Charles Dickens
Il Rosso e il Nero, Stendahl
La Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri
Orgoglio e pregiudizio, Jane Austen
Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi
Il Conte di Montecristo, Alexandre Dumas
L'insostenibile leggerezza dell'essere, Milan Kundera
Furore, John Steinbeck
Demian, Herman Hesse
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Il tamburo di latta, Günter Grass
Il piccolo principe, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Cime tempestose, Emily Brontë
Ulisse, James Joyce
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
L'importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto, Oscar Wilde
Pippi Calzelunghe, Astrid Lindgren
Amleto, William Shakespeare
I racconti di Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer
Tropico del cancro, Henry Miller
L'Iliade, Omero
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Il Decamerone, Giovanni Bocaccio
Il grande Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald
Il giovane Holden, J.D. Salinger
Il giorno dello sciacallo, Frederick Forsyth
I miserabili, Victor Hugo
La signora Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
L'origine della specie, Charles Darwin
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Cecità, José Saramago
Arancia meccanica, Anthony Burgess
Sulla strada, Jack Kerouac
Lo straniero, Albert Camus
La metamorfosi, Franz Kafka
Le cronache del ghiaccio e del fuoco, G. R. Martin
Alla ricerca del tempo perduto, Marcel Proust
L'idiota, Fëdor Dostoevskij
Il gattopardo, Tomasi di Lampedusa
Il signore degli anelli, J. R. R. Tolkien
L'ombra del vento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I viaggi di Gulliver, Jonathan Swift
Il tunnel, Ernesto Sabato
Così parlò Zaratustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
La Bibbia
Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo
Le mille e una notte
L'Eneide, Virgilio
Critica della ragion pratica, Immanuel Kant
Il profumo, Patrick Süskind
La forma dell'acqua, Andrea Camilleri
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Monte cinque, Paulo Coelho
Thérèse Raquin, Èmile Zola
Il nome della rosa, Umberto Eco
L'isola del tesoro, Robert Louis Stevenson
Il deserto dei tartari, Dino Buzzati
Viaggio al centro della terra, Jules Verne
Il cacciatore di aquiloni, Khaled Hosseini
Le avventure di Huckelberry Finn, Mark Twain
La casa degli spiriti, Isabel Allende
Le anime morte, Nikolai Gogol
Casa di bambola, Henrik Ibsen
Uno studio in rosso Arthur Conan-Doyle
Il signore delle mosche, William Golding
Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie, Lewis Carroll
Don Casmurro, Machado de Assis
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Il vecchio e il mare, Ernest Hemingway
Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
Guglielmo Tell, Friedrich Schiller
Il Codice Da Vinci, Dan Brown
Il fu Mattia Pascal, Luigi Pirandello
I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni
La coscienza di Zeno, Italo Svevo
Racconti dell'impossibile, Edgar Allan Poe
Il secondo sesso, Simone De Beauvoir
L'Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges
Le regole della casa del sidro, John Irving
Cappuccetto Rosso, fratelli Grimm
Via col vento, Margaret Mitchell
Storie, Erodoto
I fiori del male, Charles Baudelaire
Il buio oltre la siepe, Harper Lee
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Galileo Galilei
Foglie d'erba, Walt Whitman
Momo, Michael Ende
Edipo a Colono, Sofocle
I pilastri della terra, Ken Follett
I tre moschettieri, Alexandre Dumas

79. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1960)
 

I'm taking a break from exam preparations to use my second nomination before this list reaches 100. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees is one of the better poetry books I've had the pleasure of reading, or more correctly devour, consume, gobble and wolf with drooling eyes. I don't think we need any elaborate explanation for this inclusion. It's the only Kees volume worth having: one shouldn't miss a single one of his poems.


EDIT: Thank you, Duncan! Those poems are delightful. I wish not for grass, but a fast countdown of days untill I can enjoy poetry again. That book is first on my list.

80. Archaic Smile by A. E. Stallings
 

It is her first book, but it is the only book of poetry that ever inspired me to write a fan letter without having met the author first. I think her subsequent books have lived up to the promise of this one and that she will be recognized as one of the consistently great poets of the late 20th-early 21st century. It is always hard to have any perspective on the writers of one's own time, so I started by naming poets who are dead or from a generation before mine, in which case they have developed a reputation that already stands on its own. But I am betting on Alicia to be one of my contemporaries whom later writers will look back on with admiration.

I want to add that I read Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand because of its inclusion on this list, and I am very glad I did. Though I do not know Polish, I am very impressed with Clare Cavanagh's translation as a work of poetry in English. I also read George Starbuck's Desperate Measures because of the recommendation here. I am very impressed with his wit and command of technique, but the content did not leave as deep an impression on me.

Susan

Susan - Thank you for this one, (Stallings' "Archaic Smile") quite unknown to me and, on a first sample, also quite marvellous.

Susan,

I am so glad (but not surprised) that you “discovered” Szymborska, and gratified that you voiced your appreciation!

I think you are right on Stallings: IMO, she has rare grace and polish to her writing, and striking deftness -- oh, magic -- with metaphor. As with Szymborska, I felt something of Melville’s “shock of recognition” when I first read Archaic Smile.

Like others, I am sifting through a pile of books from this thread, happily, and humming…

81. North of Boston
 

There hasn’t been any activity on this thread for a few days, and it looks like it’s finally winding down after quite a run! Since we’re still about 20 short of Tony’s stated goal of 100 books, I’ll use another of my allotted picks, though I hadn’t planned to.

It seems to me that two books not yet listed, though they’ve both been alluded to in the thread, cast a longer shadow over 20th-century poetry in English than any others—North of Boston and The Wasteland. (The Wasteland, though just a single poem, was brought out as a stand-alone book after its initial magazine publication.) So much of what has been written afterwards has been an attempt to emulate, or a violent reaction against, one or the other of these two disparate masterpieces that it seems impossible to ignore them. And while my own favorite individual books of Frost and Eliot are probably New Hampshire and Four Quartets, these two still amaze me as well. (I'll pick the Frost here, and leave Eliot to someone else.)

North of Boston contains the best blank verse from the first 40 years of Frost’s life. Most of his best lyric verse to that point (other than a couple that he included in North of Boston) appeared separately a year earlier in his first published book, the more uneven A Boy’s Will. Some of the best poems from North of Boston have been included in the anthologies for decades, such as “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple Picking.” But the book also has various other poems that are well worth a second look, including “The Black Cottage” (one of my personal Frost favorites), “A Servant to Servants,” “The Wood Pile,” and the lovely “Good Hours,” which concludes the book.

I don’t have any qualms about North of Boston being the third Frost title on this list. (Others have already suggested Mountain Interval and New Hampshire, both excellent choices.) In fact, if I could pick only one book of 20th Century poetry that has more poems I’ve enjoyed and come back to over and over again, it would be one version or another of Frost’s complete or collected poems, since even Frost’s last volumes, though more uneven, all have poems I wouldn’t want to do without. But I gather the spirit of this list is to favor single volumes that hang best together as a book. North of Boston does that and, along with its companion volume A Boy’s Will, may have been more influential than any others.