Poetry-- Choose From the List

[Anna]

Please look over this list of approx 50 poets whose works can be found in the English language. If you were going to study from their works over a 5-6 or longer year span, which of these 50 poets would you choose or put on a "must read" list? Let's say you have to choose 20-30 poets from the list.

 

Also, do you know of a one volume sweep of the best of the best poetry which also contains study notes/questions for each work? .. like a poetry anthology with study notes. Thanks~~ Anna

 

 

Christopher Marlow, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Wyatt,

 

Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, John Milton, William Blake, E. e. cummings,

 

Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

 

John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Edgar Allan Poe,

 

W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Isaac Rosenberg, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde,

 

Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Hart Crane,

 

Emma Lazarus, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot,

 

Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, William Empson,

 

Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg,

 

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich,

 

William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Derek Walcott, Henry Lawson,

 

Shel Silverstein, Banjo Patterson, J. T. Bongiorno and Geoffrey Hill

[Tree House Academy]

These are my favorites. :)

 

William Shakespeare, E. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein (though I like his children's books better).

[Michelle in MO]

William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, John Milton

 

Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Edgar Allan Poe, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll

 

T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, and I would add in to your list Robert Service

 

Also, you should look at Eliana's post about her suggestions for American poetry. It's been tagged "Eliana's lit lists".

Edited February 3, 2009 by Michelle in MO
organize list better!