Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for January 2012!
The nominations will run through January 11 or until five works have made the list.
Final voting in a new poll will begin by January 11, where the month's selection will be decided.
The category for this month is:
Poetry
In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs five nominations - the original nomination plus four supporting.
Each participant has FOUR nominations this month. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third, fourth or fifth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.
To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.
What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!
The floor is now open!
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Nominations through post 32:
The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Fully nominated
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman - Fully nominated
The poems of John Keats - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - sun surfer, fantasyfan, issybird, toomanybooks, caleb72
'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. 'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness,' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'
This nomination leaves all his poems open to reading (about 400 pages worth in total) but suggests a shorter central list of poems to read, which include:
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
La Belle Dame sans Merci
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode to a Nightingale
To Autumn
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
The Eve of St. Agnes
Hyperion
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Also, not as a central list, but as additional possibilities if so inclined (though any of his poems could be read):
(in spoiler tags because of length)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Fully nominated
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, as translated by Seamus Heaney - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - Hamlet53, sun surfer, caleb72, orlok, Bookworm_Girl
Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Prize Winner 1995. The national bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Award. Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating.
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes - 2
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, as translated by Robert Bly - 2
The Withsun Weddings by Phillip Larkin - 2
Poems by T. S. Eliot - 1
Spoiler:
In favour - caleb72
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and an important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.
The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1