Poetry Recommendation

I have got to read a poetry book for my English class. Would you please recommend some good ones?

I don't know what sort of poetry you would like, but I'm guessing you'd like a shorter book by a really great poet. Here are a couple that I like:

William Stafford: Travelling Through the Dark, or another short collection of his.

Robert Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle or Life Studies. This might be a little on the long side and he's a bit melancholy.

T.S. Eliot: Lots of people new to poetry really go for Eliot. Try The Wasteland and Other Poems, which is a very slim volume. The Wasteland itself is a long poem with many sections.

Sylvia Plath's Ariel is very accessible, many short poems.

For something a little lighter, there's Ogden Nash, who is well respected but wrote a lot of little silly ditties, which might be good if you really don't like deep, introspective poetry.

These are all 20th century poets, so their writing is pretty straightforward, without a lot of obscure references and archaic metaphors.

To get an idea of what these people are about, or to browse for other poets and samples of their work, www.poets.org is a great site.

Try Poetry 180 , its a great book of contemporary, easily accessible poems assembled by the Poet Laureate of the US. They were chosen to be down to earth and supplement the Poem a Day program; so they are able to be read by ANYONE, regardless of your literature background. Some of them are downright funny....I especially like Cartoon Physics.

Look at the top 100 lists on Poetry.

Are they American poetry books, or world poetry?

How about him ?---Pablo Neruda

Since Pablo Neruda was mentioned by some members on the bookforum, I took up couple of poetry books by him the other day, and .....really liked his poems. Read this(ignore the fleck of the translation, just follow the image created as you read):

IMAGE

I am keeping the name of a woman
I barely knew locked up: it's in a box,
and now and then I pick out the syllables
that are rusted and creak like rickety pianos:
soon those trees come out, and then the rain,
the jasmine, the long victorious braids
of a woman now without a body, lost,
drowned in time as in a slow lake:
there her eyes went out like coals.

Nevertheless, there is in dissolution
the sweet scent of deth, buried arteries,
or simply a life aomng other lives.

It smells good to turn our face
only in the direciton of purity:
to feel the pulse of the raining sky
of our diminished youth:
to twirl a ring in the emptiness,
to cry out to heaven.

I regret not having time for my lives,
even for the slightest thing, the souvenir left in a compartment
of a train, in a bedroom or at the brewery,
like an umbrella left there in the rain:
perhaps these are the imperceptible lips
that speak like the cadence of the sudden
sea, in a careless moment on the road.

For that reason, Irene or Rose, Mary or Leonore,
empty boxes, dry flowers pressed in a book,
they call out from their lonely corners
and we need to open them, to hear the one without a voice,
to see those things that do not exist.

From Winter Garden


By the way, if you are interested, go check allpoetry.com.


Note:
sorry, Infinity, for my previous quote (I leave it there anyway) which seems to be inappropriate. I was being absentminded, so didn't notice that you wanted one for your ENGLISH class.

How about William Wordsworth,

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, to perish never...

or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,

Let us, then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
.....

*****
Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted,
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters returning
Back to their springs, like the rain shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

Thank you all!

For something a little lighter, there's Ogden Nash, who is well respected but wrote a lot of little silly ditties, which might be good if you really don't like deep, introspective poetry

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I was just about to mention him, I guess you beat me to it.
He's a great poet, although some of his poems can be a little...strange.

I also love Arthur O' Shaugnessy and Alfred Noyes.

You should read up on some more modern poetry, like Allen Ginsberg's Howl or some Robert Frost or Walt Whitman.

surfnazi said:

Walt Whitman

Click to expand...

O Captain My Captain

Carol Ann Duffy: The World's Wife, The Feminine Gospels

I'm studying poetry for english too. We have to do war poetry one of my faveourites is Dulce et Decorum est by Willfred Owen. That,and anything by Edgar Allen Poe.

Infinity,
I think I noticed you on another thread asking about a good romance novel. If I am correct perhaps you should give Anne Sexton a shot. She is very dramatic and feminine and absolutely lovely and revolting all at the same pleasing time! Her poetry is also easy to understand and not overly academic.

Candy,
Since you like are studying war poems, have you read Mark Twain's War Prayer? Amazing stuff. Twain is one of my favorites though.

wish you both luck, wish I was still studying poetry!