Best 100 Poetry Books of the 20th Century?
 

So, here are the rules of the game: nominate a book to be included in the "Best 100 Poetry Books of the 20th Century" list.

1) You can only nominate one book. Don't take time to apologize for the poets whom you didn't select.

2) In order to nominate a book, you must write a short, pithy paragraph about what makes this book so distinctive, and you should title your reply with name of the book + author plus its number in the list. Check the list before posting, so you don't cross-post and mess up the math!

3) Books of translation can be included, but you must indicate which translation "wowed" you.

4) Since the idea here is to share some of our private gems and spur others to purchase these books for their own libraries, you must find a place on the Internet where this book is for sale and post a link to that website.

5) Criteria for selection are up to you, but the book has to "wow" you for some reason.

6) If you really, really, really, need to put more than one book in the list, you can do so only once, but you need to do so in another "reply" so each book gets its own page.

7) Once the list gets to 100, the game is over. No more books may be added.

I guess I'll start, to show what I mean in terms of format.

Best,

Tony

1. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break
 

I've loved James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break ever since I was a teenager. It was one of the books that made me fall in love with poetry. Wright quoted Frost, who said that "If you have 24 poems in a book, the book itself should be the 25th." This is what Wright did in The Branch Will Not Break--he wrote a book in which every individual poem is terrific, but in which they share a symbol system of recurrent images-- the caves, graves, Ohio Rivers, and coal mines where jewels hide in the coal seams, which are the places of death into which we descend in order to be reborn; the horses and mysterious dark women who are spirits of nature meant to usher us into the sublime; the slag heaps and factories and the dead moon that drops its feathers on the desperate Rust Belt; the green butterflies of innocent spring beauty; the ghosts of the massacred Native Americans and slaughtered animals haunting us with the violence of our history; the darkness which is tender and a place of grace; the light which is glaring and that seeks to destroy that tender dark. These gorgeous, difficult poems are surreal, but not senseless--they are based on ideas of the "deep image" derived from Jung, the idea that one must bypass rational thought and dive into the unconscious in order to break through what Blake called our "mind-forg'd manacles." It is a book that rewards dozens of rereadings.

Here it is: http://www.upne.com/0819568414.html

Best, Tony

Fun game!

This Branch Will Not Break is one of mine, too.

A question, Tony: do you mean just U.S. poetry books or any in English?

Also, I assumed Collected or Selected Poems don't count?

Hi Andrew,

Any book of poetry published in the 20th century, in any language, anywhere in the world!

Collected and Selected are fine, so long as they are good as BOOKS. In other words, I love William Carlos Williams, but would choose Journey to Love over his Selected and his Collected in terms of its integrity of vision and the level of accomplishment, poem by poem. On the other hand, I did say in the rules that the criteria for selection are up to each individual poster.

Have fun!

T

Yeats, Collected Poems, #2
 

Well, I don’t know what I’d do without Yeats’s Collected Poems, so although it is a predictable choice here I still have to nominate it for the list. No modern poet takes me more to the place I most want to be taken by poetry. The language and craft in Yeats pull me in every time, I never tire of rereading his poems and I've learned many by heart—even the slurpy early ones, but especially his great poetry from Responsibilities on, after his cauterizing by Pound. Poems like The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Easter 1916, The Wild Swans at Coole, and on and on—they’re permanent places to return to. This is all way too generalized, so I’ll briefly comment on just one of his poems to explain why Yeats is the poet for me. “Byzantium” is an incantation:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

Talk about semantic density! Imagination, insatiable longing, gravitas, and (pace the “sensible” postindustrial world) magic—it’s all there. The poem ends:

Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

For all the archetypal imagery and fervency, that closing image comes from real life. The dolphins are from Orphic imagery that depicted dolphins as the carriers of souls into and out of this world. At the same time, Yeats says somewhere that the image of the gong came from his hearing fishermen in western Ireland banging on iron sheets to attract fish their nets. Yeats was the whole man: politics and Golden Dawn, real world and dream world—one reason why his Collected has something for everyone and are an inexhaustible source of insight and pleasure.

I forgot to post the link to the book: it's the standard Collected, which has some useful notes in it by Richard Finneran.

3. The Idle Demon by R. P. Lister
 

The book and poet who have been my vademecum ever since student days and whose rediscovery by members of the Sphere was what first made me aware of this site. The volume also has the teasing pleasure of being wrapped in a dustjacket designed by the 'spy novelist-to-be', Len Deighton. This may at first sight seem to be a collection of light verse whimsy but lying behind the easy wit and deft constructions is a breadth of culture and a warm and humane intelligence - exactly the person that Richard Lister turned out to be when I met with him, aged 97, this year. His poetry gently mocks guilt without losing human regret ('The Idle Demon'), relishes life without losing sight of its evanescence ('The Gardens of the Morning') - and bears its reflections with civilising humour ('The Owlet and the Gamekeeper', 'Before the Ball'). Even its rare moments of anger are touched by wry good nature ('The Old Peasant') and its flashes of hurt ('Three Triolets') are bared with touching humility. He evokes the natural world with a sympathy which retains a proper sense of its contrasts with the human ('The Robin', 'The Snail') and dwells on human destiny with a shrewd awareness of history and with lyricism ('Pinkerfly', 'The Troubadour', 'Freedom's Mansion'). He makes me smile, renews my faith in the happiness of life and makes me reach, as he does, for other works of art - music, pictures and books.

Thanks to the Sphere's rediscovery of him the volume has now become a bit pricey - but worth every penny or cent at http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-idle-dem.../dp/B0000CK4SD

The Idle Demon by R P Lister
 

Well, all I can say is "Ditto" to Nigel's post, above; I couldn't put it any better (probably not even as eloquently as Nigel has!)

I also met Richard this year and my copy of 'The Idle Demon' is signed by the great man himself.

Jayne

I've a feeling that it will make the thread more interesting if we exclude Collected Poems. What do people think? I mean, I'm uncertain between North of Boston and New Hampshire; if I choose the Collected, then I've got both, plus all the others...
Just a thought - but obviously it's not my thread so I don't get to choose the rules.

I agree. (Selecteds, too.) I don't see much difference between saying that Larkin's Collected is my favorite book of the century and saying that he's my favorite 20th century poet. So the thread becomes about poets rather than their books.

The potential interest in the thread for me is to deal with the poetry book as a form. It's something I think most of us ignore. I'm impressed that Gregory has two favorite Frost books. I can name most of the titles of Frost's books but for the most part I have no idea which poems are in which.

Possibly a subject for a different thread: I think most books are really collecteds or selecteds, the poet pulling together her (best) work since the last book. Very few poetry books are composed as books. The exceptions that come to mind are light verse and stuff by very minor poets.

I agree that this is very much more interesting if 'collected', 'selected' and 'complete' are all excluded.

Interesting to claim that only writers of light verse compose their works as books. Perhaps that should give pause to those who would down-grade their work? In any case, I'm not so sure that the contention is true. I could certainly nominate one rather than the rest of Larkin's books (I'm not about to) and I can think of other distinguished examples including Eliot, Dylan Thomas and, of course if he was admissable (which as he was writing in Scots he is not) MacDiarmid.

Over to the thread's originator on this one.

4. Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
 

Larkin's 'The Whitsun Weddings'. That's the definitive book of English poetry that put an end to modernism, and none too soon. Of course NOW we can see that Auden wasn't a modernist either, but we couldn't then. Larkin's poetry, along with Betjeman's was the first poetry I found by myself rather than through a course of literature. Of course you knew right away this was the real stuff. You just didn't know why.

Hi Folks,

I entirely agree about the selecteds and collecteds, but I think I've given enough rules and don't want to be to constrictive. There are poets such as Weldon Kees who are only available today in a collected poems, and, given his early death, the volume is slim enough and good enough to stand up as a book of poems.

On the other hand, you are right on, Max, that I was hoping that this thread would help to identify some books that really stand up as books. I like the idea of the book itself as a genre, well and inventively constructed. On the other hand, some of my favorite individual books, and there are many, are faves simply because such a high percentage of the poems (i.e., Yeats--thanks, Andrew) are simply brilliant.

Oh, and John, not to nudge, but can I ask you to edit your post to give it this title: 4. Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
?
That'll identify it as one of the "100."

Thanks!
T

Dunno how you can distinguish between the poets and their books.

5. Anne Sexton, Transformations
 

Transformations puts the grim back in Grimm. Sexton taps into the psychological roots of fairy tales in a way that is both personal and archetypal. For years after I first read this collection it remained vivid in my mind (even before I reread it). It opened up to me the power of reimagining and reinterpreting the classic stories from a contemporary and feminist perspective. I was impressed with the knowing, cynical, and yet emotionally invested voice of the author, and her way with metaphor was startling.

Susan

Great thread. Already I've learned of three books I'm eager to read. (The Larkin and Yeats I already love.)

The poets tend to be taller.

Neither am I, which is why I said it. I'm hoping to learn of examples to prove me wrong. Tony and Susan have already come up with two. (I'm interested to hear what Frost said about poetry books and I'm looking forward to an argument that any of his books works as a "poem.")

6. John Berryman. The DreamSongs.
 

Tony,

So the first book I thought of was The Branch Will Not Break. I was surprised, and heartened, it was also the first book mentioned. So then I thought 'What's the most important prosodic attribute of 20th century poetry?' Pretty clearly, it's the varied lyrical sequence, and Roethke's The Far Field and Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares would both make excellent candidates. And then I thought 'Who has been most important to my own life and work?' That's easy: Forche's The Country Between Us.

But then I thought 'This question is being asked on a site devoted to form,' and I almost settled on Omeros. But then, who wrote the most innovative formal poems? Who had the most spectacular use of meter and rhyme during that time? Clearly, it's Berryman. In fact, it's not even close.

So that's my nomination, purely on technical reasons: for his stunning pentameter, his inventive use of structure, and his ingenious use of rhyme, I think Berryman has to make the list.

Thanks,

Bill

7. Robert Frost: New Hampshire
 

As I said in my earlier post, for me it would be a toss-up between North of Boston and New Hampshire. While the earlier book is probably the more important from the point of view of literary history - it showed there was another way to be Modernist, or at least another way to "make it new" - in the end I think I prefer New Hampshire. North of Boston contains some of Frost's greatest narratives and dialogue/monologue poems but doesn't show Frost's equally strong gift for the lyric. That, of course, increased its impact at a time but does mean that there is the risk of monotony. New Hampshire has some great longish narratives ("Maple", "Wild Grapes", "Two Witches", which are not as famous as the earlier ones but do have a wonderful quality of weirdness), some shorter but extremely powerful narratives ("Two Look at Two", "Census Taker", for example), but the volume also contains some of his greatest short lyrics: "Dust of Snow", "Fire and Ice", "Nothing Gold Can Stay". And then there are poems that are halfway between lyric and nursery rhyme ("Gathering Leaves") poems between comedy and lyrical beauty ("Hillside Thaw") and, of course, his most famous poem ever, "Stopping by Woods". There is not a dud poem in the whole book, with the possible exception of the rather plodding title poem (which still has its quotable moments), and the range of tones, forms, registers and styles is stunning.

Ah! I found the Lister for ten bucks, yay! The others I have already. Enjoying the thread and all the discussion.

Best, TB

No. 8. Wallace Stevens: Harmonium
 

First off, his inaugural volume is a collection of great poems in its own right. There are so many great poems in one collection and of a very wide variety. We have “Invective Against Swans,” “Domination of Black,” “The Snow Man,” "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “Anecdote of a Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “Sunday Morning.” There are more others can name, including the additions to the 1931 edition. The last listed masterpiece “Sunday Morning” is a beautiful denial of the Resurrection and of religious faith. For Stevens, religion is a point of departure, not a touchstone. But with things so narrowed down, there is no easy way out for Stevens’ relentless skepticism. One may fault his near apotheosis of the human imagination but his poetry demonstrates what can be done with that imaginative faculty with which Stevens’ mind was fully equipped. His style can assume any absurdity and make it work. Harmonium reveals a keen sense of humor I have yet to find in other writers. He is one of our funniest poets. In terms of formalism he could do anything, and did, with stunning virtuosity.

Here is one source for the volume.

http://books.google.com/books/about/...d=h_OgPwAACAAJ

Don

No. 9 Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop
 

Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop is an obvious choice for reasons that have been better stated elsewhere. It combines the themes that occupied her from the beginning into a collection of poems that move in and out of a series of forms. It ranges from the famous "One Art" villanelle to the free form prose of "Crusoe in England." "The Moose" is a brilliant example of her flexibility with form and rhyme. This flexibility is what allows her to heighten emotion by stretching her quiet restraint to a near breaking point without collapsing into emotionalism. That is her last book and although she doesn't rank as highly as Yeats she does share with him the rare ability to continue to mature and grow as a poet until the end of her life.

Well, Don, it's only anglophone because of Tony's rules. Without that constraint Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle would surely be there, if only as my "really, really, really must submit" second posting - although it would have to jostle with at least one very English alternative, also published and conceived as a single work.

Nigel, Tony actually said any language is ok for the list.

Ah.. thanks for that Andrew, although I'm a bit uncertain still, as I recall Tony's number 3 was about accepting "books of translation" - and I don't think anyone has done the "Drunk Man" in English. Now there's a thought that would have had Grieve grinding his teeth!

Well, it's not really a foreign language like French, is it? I mean is the title in English or in Scots, and if it's in Scots then what's the English translation? And what makes it more of a foreign language than what William Barnes writes his poems in? And we know, or you and I do, Nigel, that many of the words he used are 'book' words. No living Scot ever used them.

Well, John, I used to think this was more true than it truly is. Of course there were, if not inventions, at least a number of 'revivals' combined with 'coinages', mostly eloquent in sound if sometimes elusive in sense; but nobody worth listening to blamed Dylan Thomas for his neologisms. However, life in the Borders has taught me that MacDiarmid's versions of Scots owed far more to local speech than academic writers have recognised.

Anyway, having endured the blasts of derision from one of the Sphere's own 'Moderators' (an odd title in the circumstances) which my own poetry in Scots has provoked, I'm not rushing to offer the "Drunk Man" as poetry in English - and, whatever you may say - it isn't. It is magnificently different, read privately or performed on stage (Tom Fleming's tour-de-force was magisterial) it is an unforgettable experience - and a grand one, well worthy of comparison with "Tam o' Shanter" and much, much more; and, by the way, it includes translations from Russian, French and German in its sweep. If contributors to this thread haven't read it - go to it - for, whether the rules here permit it or not, it is one of the great thrills not only of the twentieth century, but of many, many others as well.

10. Intimate Voices Tom Leonard
 

No derision from me, ever moderate, but I suggest that THIS is the book of poems in Scots you really need.

name a thi fathir
nuvthi sun
nuvthi holy ghostie men

Which makes me think that someone ought to have suggested a book by ee cummings who added immeasurably to the gaiety of nations.

Great thread, Tony. But the first three I was going to post turn out to be taken or ineligible -- Gegory already picked "New Hampshire," Robinson's "Children if the Night" was actually published just before the century began, and Steele's "Toward the Winter Solstice" was published just after. Three strikes. I'll have to try again when I am better rested.

David R.

11. Mountain Interval by Robert Frost
 

Coming to my senses, I make what might seem too obvious a choice -- an album with a lot of "hit singles." But it is an obvious choice for a reason. And looking over it and New Hampshire, North of Boston, and others, I am close to thinking it is Frost's best. The "hits" alone would make it worthy if the rest were filler, but there is no filler here. The slyness of "The Road Not Taken" sets the tone for a volume that exemplifies Frost's ability to embed ellipticality beneath a seemingly straightforward veneer.

The whole range is represented -- from shorts like "A Patch of Old Snow" to long narratives like "Snow," from sonnets ("Meeting and Passing," "The Oven Bird") to het-met odd jobs like "The Telephone," from long, aerated lines ("Birches," "An Old Man's Winter Night") to ballad-ish stanzas like "A Girl's Garden." I probably spend more time with New Hampshire, North of Boston, and some later things, but if someone wanted to get a sense Frost in one book, I think I'd give them this.

And if you are feeling too cool for school, and too hip for a collection with a lot of "hits," or too in the know to rank this with his others, I challenge you to read the thing cover to cover and tell me it doesn't belong on this list.

Here's a link to amazon, and here's a link to the Bartleby online version.

David R.

Hardy's Poems of 1912-1913 is first pick. Yeats' The Tower is a near run second.

I'd have picked something by Hardy, but I confess I don't know his "books" well as books. Until recently, when I got a volume of complete poems, all I had were a couple of well-thumbed selected volumes.

David R.

Yes, Tim is right; Hardy must be in this list. And the volume to include is Satires of Circumstance, which includes the poems of 1912-13. Also "Channel Firing", "Are You Digging on my Grave?" and the Satires of the title, which are a nice collection of short ironic narratives.

12. Desperate Measures, George Starbuck
 

Perhaps we all have our under appreciated poets that we love to champion. If Nigel's is R. P. Lister, then mine is George Starbuck.

Since I am unable to choose his Collected (this century, not last), I'll choose Desperate Measures from 1979. I first read it, really read it, in a large and glorious and completely bare (save a sofa and chair) apartment in one of New York's wealthier neighborhoods (I'm a spectacular cat-sitter). The traps and tricks and treats that Starbuck constructs throughout are marvelous, and their intricate design and rococo architecture became the furniture in the apartment.

Anyone interested in form should study Starbuck's construction and technical virtuosity. His best double dactyls are collected here, and some of his most interesting experiments with sonnets and villanelles. He stuffs one poem with four-letter words like zoooogenous and disagreeee (the target of a disagreeor). One poem ends in 15 consecutive one-syllable rhymes. Another poem manages two rhymes for "bilge" before its narrator kills John Hollander, the inventor the double dactyl, with a steel beam.

You are either very confused or very interested at this point, so I'll stop.

Oh, I'll second Don's suggestion of Harmonium. One of my prized possessions is the 1931 edition (with all those nice added poems) on my shelf. And there are the titles which are poems in themselves: "The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician", "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores", "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon". No one does titles better than Stevens.

George Starbuck. I'll look or George Starbuck. I have and punted THIRTY ONE POUNDS on the Selected. Orwn, this guy had better be good. But don't worry, I have confidence in your judgment. Look what you said about me!

Harmonium would rank pretty high with me too. I read it first at 18, and it was a revelation. Of course Greg is right, poems of 1912-1913 is contained within Satires of Circumstance.

I think you will love it, John. Tell me how it goes.

#13 T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets
 

Did Eliot's Four Quartets come out as a single book? I have a book in which they are the only poems. If so, I think it should qualify for #13

**Yes, I see they were brought out as a single book in 1943.

**Sorry, I forgot to explain why I think it should be included in the top 100.

When I first read these poems, I was about eighteen, and I don't think I really understood a word of them, though like any young poet-wannabe I was enamoured of Eliot's command of language, and of his craft. I approached the Four Quartets at various intervals throughout my life, and gradually, they began to make a little more sense. When last I read them, after my conversion from atheist to theist, and especially after my appreciation of Spinoza's works, who had a huge influence on the Romantic poets as well as on such notables as Herman Melville, and one of my favorite modern novelists, Bernard Malamud, as well as Albert Einstein, I think I finally dug into them with enough maturity to grasp what Eliot was trying to do.

John,

I don't think you'll be disappointed. Interesting bit of background: George was a quiet hero. He was fired from a state university for refusing to take a loyalty oath. He fought the injustice all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. Some background here: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/b...the_great.html

As for his work, every poet writing in form owes him a substantial debt, whether they acknowledge it or not. And I suspect he wouldn't have it any other way.

Thanks,

Bill

14. Another Time, by WH Auden
 

Surely we must have some Auden.

I only have his collected, but from what I piece together, I nominate Another Time, his first volume published from America.

“Law Like Love” (I guess a re-title) alone makes it worthy for me of nomination, for its pure depth and truth -- but the volume also included the stoic, imaginative trimeter genius of “As I Walked out One Evening”, and the morbidly wry “Miss Gee”; the elegy of Yeats; “Funeral Blues” and its famous love poetry; Auden’s homages to Housman and Melville; the brilliantly funny, irreverent and yearning “O Tell Me the Truth About Love”; the free verse masterpiece “Musee des Beaux Arts”; and the famous, infamous, and later disowned, “September 1, 1939”. I ‘m not sure, but “Epitaph on a Tyrant” may also have been included. For me, quite probably, his best single volume: it shows him playful, ponderous, funny, fallible, erudite, randy, and profound.

The Hardy to include (the Robinson as well) is Robert Mezey's Selected.

Frank