Since we get to post two for the list, if we really really have to, here's mine. It is Edwin Muir’s best, published (in 1956) near the end of his life—he was one of those poets who got better the older he got. Muir is one of the rare poets who had a truly mythic imagination—nothing contrived about it, he just had it. Read his stunningly human and beautiful
Autobiography for his account of how he came to experience it and express it.
One Foot in Eden is like a Muir greatest hits: besides the title poem, it has his great poem on the Annunciation, which is like Fra Angelico put into verse; and also “The Animals” (“All is new and near / In the unchanging Here”); “Milton” (“There towards the end he to the dark tower came / Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone / Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown / From a great funnel filled with roaring flame”); and greatest of all, his masterly “Horses,” which Eliot called “that great, that terrifying poem of the atomic age.” This for me is one of those books of poems that always stays with you and that you always return to. We had
a good thread on Muir a long time back, with some of his poems posted—including “The Animals” and “The Horses,” started by Alicia Stallings.
This single volume isn't in print any more, but the best collected poems of Muir is
edited by Peter Butter. Unfortunately it's rather expensive, so if you want to check it out go for the old Faber
Collected Poems, which was
reissued in 2003.