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.