What a delightful exercise! What a feeling of fraternity one gets from this sharing of strong impressions! I might almost have forgotten those taken from The Branch will not Break and The Dream Songs, and second those nominations. And Four Quartets, and the wheat in Pound, which is plentiful. The rules of the game pose some difficulties. No doubt most contemporary readers came to Stevens through The Palm at the End of Mind, a selected-collected. And Richard Wilbur has been readily available in collections at least since the seventies, so those collections would belong on the list if they were allowed. If anyone is looking for a Wilbur recommendation, there is a recent Collected.
Yet there is a rabbit-bird gestalt to the game, because in addition to discovered kingdoms of shared loves, I find there are considerable territories that mean relatively little to me, which it feels heretical to admit, Auden and Bishop, for example.
For no. 25, I nominate Frank Stanford's
the battlefield where the moon says I love you (1977). It is the Great American (Long) Poem of the 20th century, finishing lengths ahead of its competitors in the field, Gunslinger, Sandover, Cantos, though Fred Turner's marvelous sci-fi epics come closer.
battlefield is a 15,000- line lyric-epic-dream vision set in 1960 Memphis-Arkansas-Mississippi, an inspired free-verse folk-surrealist tome that realizes Whitman's prophecy of the future poem of "Death and these States," a national poem of intimate curses and blessings. Besides Amazon, available at:
http://lostroads.org/battlefield.html
For no. 26, Fitzgerald's Odyssey, which I think was formative in providing a model of modern American in meter. It used to be taught to ninth graders in the California public schools -- thank you, Mrs. Rich!
Thanks, Tony!