Personal Canon v2
 

A decade or so ago, Quincy started a thread where members could list their "personal canon"—poems they felt they couldn't do without. I thought it would be interesting to try that again with the current active membership. You can see the original thread here.


Here's me, for a start:

A.R. Ammons: I Came Upon a Plateau
John Ashbery: At North Farm
Emily Dickinson: I breathed enough to take the Trick; To hang our head – ostensibly
Robert Frost: Out, Out—
Jack Gilbert: Going Wrong
Geoffrey Hill: In Memory of Jane Fraser
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring and Fall; The Windhover; No worst, there is none...
Langston Hughes: Afro-American Fragment
John Milton: (When I consider how my light is spent)
Marianne Moore: A Jelly-fish
Fernando Pessoa: Maritime Ode; By the moonlight, in the distance
Wallace Stevens: No Possum, No Sop, No Taters; Man Carrying Thing
May Swenson: Bleeding; Secure
Virgil: Aeneid

Hey Aaron,

Thanks for this thread (and the link to the other one), I just spotted it! I'm going to get around to this and I hope it gets lots of response. Mainly because it could be a great resource. I love the idea of some curated lists to broaden my horizons.

Mark

I really like this, Aaron. It's a great idea. It is hard to narrow down, though, and I'm going to suck and be broader than you, in general.

I'll do my best, though I'll likely give the collections of some of the older stuff since I'm about to be moving and a number of my books are in boxes.

I'll also keep it to poetry proper and not count dramatic verse.

But what I like about this is that these are works that are consciously a part of my poetry; they shape me as a person and a writer.

Greek

Homer: Iliad and Odyssey
Sappho: Lyrics

Latin

Ovid: Amores, Ars Amatoria, Metamorphoses
Horace: Odes, Satires

Classical Chinese

Book of Songs
T'ao Te Ching
Li Po: Pretty much everything I've read of him. I have multiple translations.
Wang Wei: I have the Hinton translation, and I read it every year.
T'ao Ch'ien: "Peach-Blossom Spring"

Near Eastern Tradition: I'm putting Biblical works and works in tied into any Islamic tradition.

Psalms: I love the Alter translations, though there are some excellent ones by Milton and the Sidneys.
Job
Kabir

French

Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en Prose, Les Fleurs du Mal Packed up but almost all of each of these are important to me.
Verlaine
Mallarmé: my Verlaine and Mallarme are packed up. Suffice it to say I love a lot of them.
Jacob: Prose Poems
Follain

German

Hölderlin: Most of his late odes (I've got a draft of a translation of his "Bread and Wine" I'm still tinkering with) and a lot of his short poems. His "Half of Life" is one of the most perfectly realized short poems in any language.
Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies. Rilke is one of my very first poetic loves.

English

Chaucer: Pretty much everything, but in particular The Canterbury Tales. As one of my undergraduate professors said, Chaucer is the Prince of Poets.
Donne: "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
Jonson: "To Penshurst," "On My First Son" (One of the few poems that makes me feel real human emotion)
Marvel: "To his Coy Mistress"
Milton: Paradise Lost (perhaps my favorite epic/poem). "Methought I saw" (perhaps my favorite sonnet)
Pope: "Essay on Criticism" (best writing advice)
Blake: Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "London"
Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey," large parts of The Prelude, "Intimations of Immortality"
Keats: (almost all of his mature work moves me a great deal) "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode to a Nightingale," "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream"
Dickinson: packed...I can't look at the one's I've starred!
Browning: "Childe Roland"
Eliot: Prufock, Waste Land, Four Quartets
Pound: Early Cantos
Stevens: Best poet of the 20th century, in my book, so there are SO many. But, the core for me are probably "Sunday Morning," "Ideas of Order at Key West," "The Man on the Dump," "Auroras of Autumn," "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Credences of Summer," "Of Mere Being" (one of my favorite poems ever), "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters," "Anglais Mort á Florence" There are too many! These are from memory, so it gives you a sense of my hierarchy.
WC Williams: "Between Walls"
HD: "Sea Rose"
Moore: "Critics and Connoisseurs," "The Steeple-Jack"
Bishop: So many here, too. To focus: "A Cold Spring," "The Bight," "At the Fishhouses," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "The Moose," "In the Waiting Room"
O'Hara: "Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan"
Berryman: 77 Dream Songs
Ashbery (another whose poems I've starred are in a box waiting for transport).

I'm sure I'm forgetting some.

Nice list, Andrew. I just ordered the Hinton Wang Wei on your recommendation, and I'll probably be pilfering from your list for some time. You also reminded me that I forgot a Milton poem that belongs on my list.

Mark, looking forward to seeing yours once you get around to it.

Hi Aaron,

I'm just wondering - is it too big an ''ask'' for a link to the poems people are mentioning... going forward, that is, as the ones already posted don't have links.

I see lots of stuff that interests me, and maybe I'm just lazy, but I feel like I want to see and read a particular poem straight away, with a One-Click!

Jayne

"When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" is just a fantastic poem. I didn't put it on my list simply because I worried my list was too extensive.

I realized I somehow didn't put Job on that list; Job is my second favorite book from the Bible (behind Ecclesiastes).

I wish there were an Ovid that I think could truly capture the wonderful poetry and subversiveness of the Metamorphoses. I'd recommend the Michael Simpson, which is prose, as it often nails the irreverence. Ovid is someone you'd like: he loves Vergil and the Aeneid, as well as Homer, but finds nothing sacred. There's a reason he's Shakespeare's favorite.

Jayne, I added links where I could to my list.

Andrew, I will read Ovid... eventually.

I'm happy to answer questions about why I'm so attached to any of the poems on my list.

Jayne, I added links to the more contemporary poems (Stevens to today) that have good sources.

Thank you, Aaron and Andrew. It saves a lot of time to have a link, where it's possible, and I'm working my way through the poems. Some unfamiliar ones to enjoy!

Jayne

William Blake — The little vagabond, Ah! Sunflower
John Keats — Ode to a Nightingale
Shakespeare — There is a willow grows aslant a brook (from Hamlet)
Thomas Hardy — The Oxen
Lorca — He died at dawn
Louis MacNeice -- Snow
Edward Thomas — Old Man
Carol Ann Duffy — Prayer
Edna St Vincent Millay — If I should learn in some quite casual way
Philip Larkin — First Sight, Church Going
TS Eliot — Preludes
Elizabeth Bishop — The Moose
Sylvia Plath -- Mushrooms
Dylan Thomas — Child's Christmas in Wales (an honorary poem for the purposes of this list)
Raymond Carver — Luck
Robert Burns — Tam o shanter
ee cummings — since feeling is first

A personal list from someone whose poetic education is a work in progress. Of course the list could be different, but these came to mind quickly, so I trusted my instincts. I limited myself to one per poet, except for Blake (who got me into poetry at 15 via Jim Morrison) and Larkin (who got me back into poetry in my 30s after I watched a TV documentary about him one rainy Sunday). I treated them to two.

I don't think my links work. Will try to rectify. :(