71. Guillaume Apollinaire - Alcools
I was torn between Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and this, but it's my last choice, so the Apollinaire has to win. Any number of reprints (including in translation) readily available of course, but worth looking on Abebooks for something attractive. For example Horizon did a nice Choix de Poésies in 1945 with, if I remember rightly, the famous Picasso drawing with the bandage as a frontispiece. Although UK-published it carries only the French text - in the 40s a working knowledge of French was still thought to be a precondition of literacy.
I should be sorry if Mr Eliot should remain represented only by the dreary Four Quartets, but then there's MacNeice's Autumn Journal, Cavafy, well, all the Greeks (where is Alicia Stallings when we need her?) . .
the Russians, Brecht, Celan . . .
I'm sure we could all get to a hundred by ourselves.
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