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.