Good books on poetry

Looking at my bookshelf, I have a number of books I'd highly recommend to anyone on writing or reading poetry, as well as a few books I don't own but can also recommend.

So here is the beginnings of a list of good books on poetry. These are listed in order of preference and will be expanded over time:

Shaw, Robert. (2007). Blank Verse : a guide to its history and use. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press
A detailed, ambitious focus solely on iambic pentameter since its origins in the sixteenth century, and particularly valuable for covering 20th and 21st century poets that have written in blank verse, such as Howard Nemerov and Rachel Hadas. Essential if you want to understand the form.

Fussell, Paul. (1979). Poetic Meter & Poetic Form. Revised Ed. McGraw-Hill.
Informative book on meter, and yes, form, that's well-written and actually shows how meter and form create meaning as well as the rest of the poem. A useful reference book for readers and every poet or would-be poet should have read this or a similar book.

Keats, John. (2001). Selected Letters 1817-1820. In Complete Poems and Selected letters of John Keats. New York: The Modern Library.
This edition is only one of many published. These letters show the development of Keats' poetic career, knowledge, maturity, and understanding of poetry itself. It's in these letters he discusses the famous concept of "Negative Capability".

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2004). Letters to a Young Poet. Translation by Herter Norton, M.D. Revised Ed. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Again one of many publications. Letters written by Rilke to a would-be poet from 1903-1908. Rilke has a sensitive way of describing sensibility, and poetic and life choices, and is unabashedly emotional about it. If you feel jaded and too intellectual about your poetry, this could be an inspiring read.

Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to Read a Poem : and Fall in Love with Poetry. Houghton Miffler Harcourt.
In my mind I always add "..all over again." to the end of the title. Another wonderful book for fresh enthusiasm and reading poetry you might not otherwise read. Also informative. The first chapter can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Kowit, Steve. (2003). In the Palm of Your Hand : the Poet's Portable Workshop. Atlantic Books.
The cover calls this "lively", and it is. Kowit aims to reach both new and experienced poets, covering just about everything you could imagine in a small volume. Because it's a general guide I would suggest it to inexperienced poets first, readers second, and everyone else when they feel the need to do some general reading again.

Favourite poets

My biases will be obvious from this list of my favourite poets. I don't tend to read a lot of contemporary poetry.

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."

Reading poetry

Every poem is personal; every poet feels like they belong to you and no-one else. I know very little about famous poets' lives; have read very few biographies or even searched Wikipedia for many of them. But it doesn't matter. The poem is more important than the poet (numerous quotes could be inserted here). Reading something like Hart Crane's Voyages, for example.. "permit me voyage, love, into your hands", his last, major poem The Broken Tower, I don't have to think about Crane's love of his life, a sailor for whom the sex was casual, or his one heterosexual love Peggy, on the boat with him when he died. This aspect of the poem (it's background, conception and personal context for the poet) is interesting, sometimes useful even, if you want to know how the poem was intended to be read. But if you are just reading from your personal situation, which I would argue any emotional reading would be, you take the words and interpret them in the light of your own experience, and if they're good, they might alter how you see aspects of your own life or people in it.