Favorite Poems/Favorite Poets

As they say in The Little Rascals, "Learn that poem!"

My three favs are from the heavy hitters - "Alone" by Poe, Shakespeare's Sonnet 121, and TS Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (as Owen Wilson says in Midnight in Paris, "Prufrock is my mantra!")

the Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

Sonnet 121

’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing.
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad that I think good?
No, I am that I am; and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,
Unless this general evil they maintain:
All men are bad and in their badness reign.

and one much lesser known, From Third Avenue On published 1915 by Djuna Barnes

And now she walks on out turned feet
Beside the litter in the street
Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet
Within the town.
She does not stir to doff her dress,
She does not kneel low to confess,
A little conscience, no distress
And settles down.

Ah God! she settles down we say;
It means her powers slip away
It means she draws back day by day
From good or bad.
And so she looks upon the floor
Or listens at an open door
Or lies her down, upturned to snore
Both loud and sad.

Or sits beside the chinaware,
Sits mouthing meekly in a chair,
With over-curled, hard waving hair
Above her eyes.
Or grins too vacant into space—
A vacant space is in her face—
Where nothing came to take the place
Of high hard cries.

Good question. And as most of those it's one where I can't find a definitive answer.

I'm admittedly not really a connoisseur of poetry and never spend much time reading poets, only occassionally, therefore only knowing a handful from most notable poets.

However a few were I really liked their works a lot:
Friedrich Schiller
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Charles Baudelaire
Edgar Allan Poe

Louis Jenkins a prose poet, passed away last month - I didn't know until today looking him up. Known perhaps for his association and friendship with Mark Rylance who "performed" two of his poems during his Tony acceptance speeches - here's a great one called Backcountry:



I have a Jenkins collection called Winter Road that I like - his work is simple, dry, wry, and wonderful. Here's another one called Flight:

Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even to a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour de force, really. There's a lot of running and flapping involved and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching, waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows? You might just make it.

I actually bumped into Rylance after seeing his Richard III and chatted with him about Jenkins for a bit - he really lit up about his work, "Isn't he wonderful?? Doesn't he make you laugh?? " were his exact words.

Suicide in The Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

A very famous poem, a very great one too, particularly when the world seems about to go mad - politically, ethically - and one of the great single poetic lines, ever: "the ceremony of innocence is drowned"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Tom Waits reads the best Bukowski poem, for your pleasure:

Edna St. Vincent Millay -

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
    It gives a lovely light!

Not poetry-literate at all sadly and this is the most higschool-level answer ever, but you can't go wrong with Frost's "The Road Not Taken." I love its ambiguous tone. You can really project anything you want on this poem.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Is that a sigh of regret or nostalgia? Maybe contentment in the feeling that he made the right choice or anxiety at the thought of all the roads he missed. "That has made all the difference." For better or worse? Whenever I read that line I feel like it's for the better. In a weird way this poem reminds me of why I love Picnic at Hanging Rock so much, because beneath the plot and mystery elements there's a clear sense of moving beyond something, of becoming extricated from a previous existence, and I find that to be a freeing and beautiful thought. I get the same sense from the last line in Frost's poem. That he took the road "less traveled by" makes all the difference indeed.

Love this one by Charles Willeford.......

"Perforce"

Am I the guilty stone in the avalanche?
Did I take the other road?
The grinning violence of a small death
I revitalize in half-blind driving,
Marking ghostly landmarks, haze-hidden points,
Unclosed parentheses, indelible sitzmarks—
Unlimited tolls.

But this one, I know, is a toll-free call,
A long distance surprise like a pressed flower
In a calf-bound dictionary
Between “Corinth” and “Cornucopia.”

So I will inch painfully down
The splintered pole of memory
Where we can meet each other again,
When I was more unaware than wary.

Worlds best living actor contender - UK version - Anthony Hopkins reads Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: