Help us choose the January 2014 selection to read for the MR Literary Club! The poll will be open for three days.
The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like.
A discussion thread will begin shortly after a winner is chosen.
In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll. In the event that the run-off poll also ends in a tie, the tie will be resolved in favour of the selection that received all of its initial nominations first.
Select from the following works:
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney
The poems of Wallace Stevens
Spoiler:
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
The poems of John Keats
Spoiler:
Quote:
'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)
Keats, John: Complete Poetry, epub here at Mobileread
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Spoiler:
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
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Aimless Love by Billy Collins