My love of poetry began with a small brown book, with the cover text faded completely off and the spine starting to disintegrate. Inside this book I found selections from two Romantic poets who have formed my ideas of what poetry is and my tastes.
John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I've long lost this little book, but I now own the complete works of both poets, along with the selected letters of Keats, a useful poetics text. Favourite poems include Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, La Belle Dame sans Merci; Shelley's The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, Ozymandias...and others that don't immediately come to mind.
Next Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens (I seem to group my poets in pairs). These two modernist poets offer the same thing, to me, from slightly different angles. Crane and Stevens both use an oblique, difficult kind of language to convey the idea or emotion they are writing about. Stevens tends to be more about the concept than Crane, who tends to go for the feeling. Favourite poems? Include Crane's Voyages, To Brooklyn Bridge (from The Bridge); Stevens' Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, The Idea of Order at Key West, and the famous Sunday Morning...
Other (minor) poetic mentions include Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman... and the only woman on my list, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh)...
More on this topic to come, however.
N.B. The title of this blog comes from Edgar Bowers' moving and skillful poem Autumn Shade.
"For there he is,
In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death,
Carrying bread and water to a quiet,
Placing ten sounds together in one sound:
Confirming his election, or merely still,
Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun."
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