Happy New Year!
Auld lang syne and all that. Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for January 2014!
The nominations will run for four days until 5 January. Then, a separate voting poll will begin 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 four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting.
Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) 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 are now closed. Final nominations:
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney - Fully nominated
The poems of Wallace Stevens - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - issybird, Bookpossum, paola, Hamlet53
This is from The Poetry Foundation:
Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time
Like Trollope, Stevens had a day job, in the insurance industry.
issybird has been looking around and sees several possibilities:
Poem Hunter has a selection of his poems in the public domain in
PDF format.
Or there's the collection of all his poems.
Kindle Kobo and other ebookstores, but it's much more expensive than Amazon.
The collection selected by his daughter,
The Palm at the End of the Mind also is available in eformat and is slightly cheaper, but issybird's own druthers would be to get the complete collection and read the poems from his first work,
Harmonium. Most of the Harmonium poems are public domain and she thinks can be read online at
Poem Hunter. There are also much cheaper used pbook options.
Inferno by Dante - Fully nominated
The poems of John Keats - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - sun surfer, Bookworm_Girl, Bookpossum, paola
Quote:
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'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.'
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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)
Keats, John: Complete Poetry, epub here at Mobileread
High Windows by Philip Larkin - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - paola, issybird, sun surfer, fantasyfan
paola said:
Another poet who also had to work to earn his keep,
Philip Larkin. He is crude, but oh so effective! The
Collected poems would be good, but to keep it manageable I'd suggest
High Windows - a couple of the poems are available at the Poetry Foundation, otherwise it is available at
Amazon uk,
Amazon US, and couponable on
Kobo.
The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Fully nominated
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes - Fully nominated
Aimless Love by Billy Collins - Fully nominated
Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire - 2
Poems and Songs by Robert Burns - 1
Spoiler:
In favour - Hamlet53
Hamlet53 said:
Scotland's favorite son and national poet. This is a collection of 43 of his best poems and songs. For
Auld Land Syne, my friends for
Auld Lang Syne.
Kindle
Kobo