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Poems

Blogs > Oreo7
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Oreo7
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States1647 Posts
May 28 2011 03:38 GMT
#1
Hey TL, I was wondering if you guys have any favorite poems.

Recently I really like Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Shelleys "Ozymandias". I really like Romanticism, although I don't necessarily agree with the philosophy, I feel it does provide a generally happy world view which is hard to find in literature.

Got any recommendations? Major turn offs for me are heavy god themes (I have trouble reading most Milton because of this), and bad love poetry.

Stork HerO and Protoss everywhere - redfive on bnet
Glaven
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Canada554 Posts
May 28 2011 03:46 GMT
#2
John Donne for sure, light hearted and impossibly witty. Lots of clever use of imagery and symbolism and all that other good stuff.

"The Flea" is a "romantic" poem but is playful and extremely clever: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/flea.php

"A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" is another one of my favorites: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php
Special Tactics
nbaker
Profile Joined July 2009
United States1341 Posts
May 28 2011 03:49 GMT
#3
My favorite poems are Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge and anything by T.S. Eliot. I really like poems that make beautiful and interesting images without bothering to tie them together neatly into some kind of narrative or simple description.
CDRdude
Profile Blog Joined May 2007
United States5625 Posts
May 28 2011 04:00 GMT
#4
I like this one:

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Force staff is the best item in the game.
infinitestory
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
United States4053 Posts
May 28 2011 04:07 GMT
#5
On May 28 2011 12:49 nbaker wrote:
My favorite poems are Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge and anything by T.S. Eliot. I really like poems that make beautiful and interesting images without bothering to tie them together neatly into some kind of narrative or simple description.

+1 to Kubla Khan. It's a genius work.

Mending Wall by Robert Frost is pretty interesting too, especially in historical context.
Translator:3
Oreo7
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States1647 Posts
May 28 2011 04:14 GMT
#6
Kubla Khan is quite good, if I'm not incorrect that's another romantic poem. Those are all really quite good.
Stork HerO and Protoss everywhere - redfive on bnet
Carnivorous Sheep
Profile Blog Joined November 2008
Baa?21243 Posts
May 28 2011 04:17 GMT
#7
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe is probably my favorite poem.

Dante's Divine Comedy is technically a poem, and is another one of my favorites. Paradise Lost by John Milton as well.

John Donne is great as someone mentioned. Death be Not Proud is a particular favorite of mine.

Other good ones include The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, and Ode to a Grecian Urn and Ode to Psyche by John Keats.
TranslatorBaa!
Chef
Profile Blog Joined August 2005
10810 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-28 04:23:29
May 28 2011 04:20 GMT
#8
I recommend you just buy a comprehensive anthology that spans a wide range of time. It seems to be what you're looking for. Pretty much everything in an anthology will be pretty deep with fair amount to chew on for an analytical mind.

Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you took an English course one time." I suppose it can't be helped. I myself almost never read poetry outside of the literary canon.
LEGEND!! LEGEND!!
tnkted
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States1359 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-28 04:30:20
May 28 2011 04:23 GMT
#9
How about i sing of olaf glad and big? Its one of my favorite poems:

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.


Or if you're feeling a little bit more modern you could listen to ginsburg read Howl parts 1 & 2 right here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308 Its amazing to me that they are able to do that. Listening to Ginsburg read this poem is the literary equivalent of listening to Jimmy hendrix playing the national anthem at woodstock.

Or you could read this poem thats apparently really famous but I'd never heard of it before one of my classes this year:


The Bear
BY GALWAY KINNELL

1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?


I'll give you a hint: its not really a ghost story.
'I think "tnkted" may have justified this entire thread.' - Mjolnir
Treadmill
Profile Joined July 2010
Canada2833 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-28 04:36:22
May 28 2011 04:35 GMT
#10
One of my all-time favourites.
"unstructured space is a deluge"
+ Show Spoiler +
Progressive insanities of a pioneer
Margaret Atwood

i

He stood, a point
on a sheet of green paper
proclaiming himself the centre,

with no walls, no borders
anywhere; the sky no height
above him, totally unenclosed
and shouted:

Let me out!


ii

He dug the soil in rows,
imposed himself with shovels
He asserted
into the furrows, I
am not random.

The ground replied with aphorisms:

a tree-sprout, a nameless
weed, words
he couldn't understand.


iii

The house pitched
the plot staked
in the middle of nowhere.

At night the mind
inside, in the middle
of nowhere.

The idea of an animal
patters across the roof.

In the darkness the fields
defend themselves with fences
in vain:
everything
is getting in.


iv

By daylight he resisted.
He said, disgusted
with the swamp's clamourings and the outbursts
of rocks,
this is not order
but the absence
of order.

He was wrong, the unanswering
forest implied:

It was
an ordered absence


v

For many years
he fished for a great vision,
dangling the hooks of sown
roots under the surface
of the shallow earth.

It was like
enticing whales with a bent
pin. Besides he though

in that country
only the worms were biting.


vi

If he had known unstructured
space is a deluge
and stocked his log house—
boat with all the animals

even the wolves

he might have floated.

But obstinate he
stated, The land is solid
and stamped,

watching his foot sink
down through stone
up to the knee.


vii

Things
refused to name themselves; refused
to let him name them.

The wolves hunted
outside.

On his beaches, his clearings,
by the surf of under—
growth breaking
at his feet, he foresaw
disintegration

and in the end

through eyes
made ragged by his
effort, the tension
between subject and object,

the green
vision, the unnamed
whale invaded.


You might want to check out some other 20th century poets - Atwood, ee cummings, and Seamus Heaney are some of my faves.

EDIT: added spoiler tags. the poem is kinda long.
Torte de Lini
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
Germany38463 Posts
May 28 2011 04:35 GMT
#11
Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked in fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splinering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call
and slowly I would rise and dress
fearing the chronic angers of the house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices



The name eludes me, but I always loved this poem.
https://twitter.com/#!/TorteDeLini (@TorteDeLini)
tnkted
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States1359 Posts
May 28 2011 04:37 GMT
#12
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you took an English course one time." I suppose it can't be helped. I myself almost never read poetry outside of the literary canon.


Yeah this is a common problem. I think its because they teach the most boring poems in school; there are way more exciting poems that you could spend your time reading than the ones they give you in school. I mean Liz Browning is great but she has way better poems then "let me count the ways I love thee." And don't even get me started on the merits of presenting Plath to a bunch of middle schoolers.

You just have to find the right poet! Modern readers will find the most complexity and surprise in poems that are more contemporary because older poems feel dated. I posted two big (relatively) contemporary hits above, but there are a ton of really really good poets that are still living and writing today who write stuff that is much more exciting to me than things written by dead people. Robert Hass is an example. Also Billy Collins (although I think he died recently) and that Gluck woman, whatshername... I think its Lucille Gluck although I could be mistaken.
'I think "tnkted" may have justified this entire thread.' - Mjolnir
Torte de Lini
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
Germany38463 Posts
May 28 2011 04:40 GMT
#13
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you read and became interested in poetry on your own"


I fixed it for you. I'd die just once if my english classes taught any remote form of poetry.
https://twitter.com/#!/TorteDeLini (@TorteDeLini)
tnkted
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States1359 Posts
May 28 2011 04:41 GMT
#14
On May 28 2011 13:35 Torte de Lini wrote:
Show nested quote +
Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked in fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splinering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call
and slowly I would rise and dress
fearing the chronic angers of the house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices



The name eludes me, but I always loved this poem.


Thats Robert Hass! No... Hayden. Yep, just googled it, Robert Hayden.
'I think "tnkted" may have justified this entire thread.' - Mjolnir
Chef
Profile Blog Joined August 2005
10810 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-28 04:45:22
May 28 2011 04:41 GMT
#15
On May 28 2011 13:37 tnkted wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you took an English course one time." I suppose it can't be helped. I myself almost never read poetry outside of the literary canon.


Yeah this is a common problem. I think its because they teach the most boring poems in school; there are way more exciting poems that you could spend your time reading than the ones they give you in school.

What? This is like the opposite of what I said. And don't call Elizabeth Browning "Liz" lol. Every single poet mentioned in this thread (including Mrs. Browning) is taught in school.

On May 28 2011 13:40 Torte de Lini wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you read and became interested in poetry on your own"


I fixed it for you. I'd die just once if my english classes taught any remote form of poetry.

English in high school is different from English in university. English in high school is just trying to teach you how to read and write proficiently, with a few famous examples. English in university is a wide survey of each movement that makes up the history of English literature, and you will certainly encounter legitimate study of poetry
LEGEND!! LEGEND!!
Torte de Lini
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
Germany38463 Posts
May 28 2011 04:43 GMT
#16
On May 28 2011 13:41 tnkted wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 28 2011 13:35 Torte de Lini wrote:
Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked in fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splinering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call
and slowly I would rise and dress
fearing the chronic angers of the house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices



The name eludes me, but I always loved this poem.


Thats Robert Hass! No... Hayden. Yep, just googled it, Robert Hayden.


@____________@
I love you.

Thanks a lot. I wasn't aware of who wrote it for awhile, but I've always been fond of this poem, fond of the theme.
https://twitter.com/#!/TorteDeLini (@TorteDeLini)
Oreo7
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States1647 Posts
May 28 2011 04:45 GMT
#17
I read poems both in and out of school . Ozy I read outside at first, the other two inside school, though Frost was life 5th grade and I reread it on my own last year. My dad has a bunch of anthologies I like to look through and poetry.org is a great resource.
Stork HerO and Protoss everywhere - redfive on bnet
tnkted
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States1359 Posts
May 28 2011 04:46 GMT
#18
On May 28 2011 13:41 Chef wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 28 2011 13:37 tnkted wrote:
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you took an English course one time." I suppose it can't be helped. I myself almost never read poetry outside of the literary canon.


Yeah this is a common problem. I think its because they teach the most boring poems in school; there are way more exciting poems that you could spend your time reading than the ones they give you in school.

What? This is like the opposite of what I said. And don't call Elizabeth Browning "Liz" lol. Every single poet mentioned in this thread (including Mrs. Browning) is taught in school.


I know, that's my point. So many people today don't like poetry because the poems they teach in school are the most boring ones. Yes, many of Shakespeares poems are really good and fun to read but to someone who woke up ten minutes before the bus showed up Shakespeare is the least interesting thing in the world. You don't show your girlfriend Thorzain videos when you introduce her to starcraft, you show her Boxer or TLO vods.

(and my spellchecker hated Elizabeth no matter how I spelt it so I just said liz instead to satisfy my OCD.)
'I think "tnkted" may have justified this entire thread.' - Mjolnir
flowSthead
Profile Blog Joined March 2011
1065 Posts
May 28 2011 06:07 GMT
#19
My favorite poems are pretty much anything by Pablo Neruda. Or at least any of the stuff I have read so far by him, and I have only read one and a half of his books. I also really enjoy Siegfried Sassoon.
"You can be creative but I will crush it under the iron fist of my conservative play." - Liquid`Tyler █ MVP ■ MC ■ Boxer ■ Grubby █
Iranon
Profile Blog Joined March 2010
United States983 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-28 07:26:31
May 28 2011 07:20 GMT
#20
My favorite is either Tractor by Ted Hughes (spoilered below) or The Wasteland.

EDIT: Actually, that's probably a complete lie. My real favorite poems are all by Jack Prelutsky and possibly some Shel Silverstein. I'm currently thinking of such enduring greats as When Daddy Sat on the Tomatoes. Seriously, "A Pizza the Size of the Sun" is one of my most treasured books.

+ Show Spoiler +
The tractor stands frozen - an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses - capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive - but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat - it just coughs.
It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.

And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization -
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing.
AiurZ
Profile Blog Joined May 2004
United States429 Posts
May 28 2011 08:04 GMT
#21
I like Andrew Marvell because he is the prototypical science fiction poet.

Also, I like George Herbert because he was so gifted that he could write bad poetry.


picture of dogs.jpg
zOula...
Profile Blog Joined January 2008
United States898 Posts
May 28 2011 08:23 GMT
#22
I like this one by Charles Bukowski + Show Spoiler +
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, 'be happy Henry!'
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: 'Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?'

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled
SirJolt
Profile Blog Joined October 2009
the Dagon Knight4004 Posts
May 28 2011 09:42 GMT
#23
EE Cummings - Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town
William Carlos Williams - This is just to say


Both are wonderful heartgrabbers
Moderator@SirJolt
bellhop
Profile Blog Joined March 2011
United States165 Posts
May 28 2011 19:23 GMT
#24
On May 28 2011 13:37 tnkted wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 28 2011 13:20 Chef wrote:
Sometimes when people say what their favourite poem is, I get the intense feeling of "wow, you took an English course one time." I suppose it can't be helped. I myself almost never read poetry outside of the literary canon.


Yeah this is a common problem. I think its because they teach the most boring poems in school; there are way more exciting poems that you could spend your time reading than the ones they give you in school. I mean Liz Browning is great but she has way better poems then "let me count the ways I love thee." And don't even get me started on the merits of presenting Plath to a bunch of middle schoolers.

You just have to find the right poet! Modern readers will find the most complexity and surprise in poems that are more contemporary because older poems feel dated. I posted two big (relatively) contemporary hits above, but there are a ton of really really good poets that are still living and writing today who write stuff that is much more exciting to me than things written by dead people. Robert Hass is an example. Also Billy Collins (although I think he died recently) and that Gluck woman, whatshername... I think its Lucille Gluck although I could be mistaken.


Billy Collins is still alive and well. Also, I agree that Louise Gluck is pretty good, we read her work recently in a workshop class.

"Here, Bullet", by Brian Turner is a great collection of poetry about the Iraq War, and is definitely worth reading. And, to the person posting the Bukowski poem, I have read a lot of Bukowski but hadn't read that one before. Great poem!
Ceci n'est pas une disloqueur.
Carnivorous Sheep
Profile Blog Joined November 2008
Baa?21243 Posts
May 28 2011 21:09 GMT
#25
I disagree. I find little interest in "modern" and more contemporary poems.It's all about the dead white European men for me ~_~

A blanket statement that "dated" poems are boring while contemporary poetry is better is quite silly ;o
TranslatorBaa!
jon arbuckle
Profile Blog Joined November 2009
Canada443 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-05-29 00:36:20
May 29 2011 00:32 GMT
#26
On May 28 2011 12:38 Oreo7 wrote:
Recently I really like Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Shelleys "Ozymandias". I really like Romanticism, although I don't necessarily agree with the philosophy, I feel it does provide a generally happy world view which is hard to find in literature.

Got any recommendations? Major turn offs for me are heavy god themes (I have trouble reading most Milton because of this), and bad love poetry.


If what draws you to romanticism is its stock in human emotion and lack of cynicism and despair (as opposed to its formality), I'd recommend Frank O'Hara. His mechanics are looser (more Whitman/Ginsberg), but his enthusiasm, spontaneity, and emotion is contagious. Urban (e.g. Love Poems), not bound to tried descriptions of forest scenery, sort of sprints out with feeling for his subjects, making his poetry immensely readable, touching, and pertinent. His "Having a coke with you" is one of my favourite love poems (or poems period) because it communicates without cheese or cliche something mundane, makes it huge, which is all you can ask for from a poem, really.

From the sound of it you'd also like William Carlos Williams.

I haven't read Hart Crane yet, but supposedly his The Bridge attempts to apply the The Wasteland to something optimistic, positive, and sincere. Try that too.

edit: Also, for reserved (i.e. less scattershot than O'Hara, less spare than WCW), more explicitly abstract and philosophical poetry, check out Wallace Stevens.
Mondays
Kamille
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
Monaco1035 Posts
May 29 2011 01:07 GMT
#27
T.S. Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock is the greatest youth poem. It's revealed to me more than I know about myself. A poem powerful enough to connect the speaker, audience and poet.

For Romanticism, I'd just suggest John Keats' Bright Star or Lord Byron's She walks in beauty.
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