Favorite poem?

Question

My favorite poem is T.S. Eliot's "Hollowmen". It is a beautiful poem and even more so when it is read by T.S. Eliot himself. Please share your favorite poems and the poets who created them.

Answer 1

My favorite is usually whichever one I'm reading at the time, - recently came across Agha Shahid Ali's works. Among them, his last from Country Without a Post Office, titled: After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan.

Ali liked Eliot too. Wrote a critical article on Eliot: "Eliot as Editor."

Have you seen Tom and Viv? It's the movie about TS Eliot and his wife. Very interesting.

Answer 2

The Road Less Traveled by Robert Frost

Answer 3

With a lifetime of poetry reading behind me, it would be impossible to come up with one favorite poem. So everyday I go back to a different one.

Yesterday it was Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove . . . .

The day before that it was Coleridge's "Kublai Khan":

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
a stately pleasure-dome decree,
where Alph, the sacred river, ran
through caverns measureless to man
down to a sunless sea . . . .

But today your question reminded me of one I hadn't thought of in a long time, one that I cherish above all others (well, today I do). It's by e e cummngs:


pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go


And tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow maybe I'll go back to William Blake, who's really my favorite poet of all time.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Now, after "The Hollow Men," what is your next favorite?

Answer 4

I do have to say, Prufrock is one of my favorites...the imagery in it is absolutely lovely. It shows this stretched-out, wasted life in a strangely beautiful way...

Though it's a play filled with poetry rather than a poem, Byron's Manfred is another favorite of mine (we jokingly refer to it as the world's only good goth poetry).

For a single poem...I would probably have to choose Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. I love the images of the elements and that Romantic Promethean idea of fire as human thought.

"Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth."

Answer 5

Invicitus by William Ernest Henley

http://bestclips.com/index/clips/view_unit/9/?letter=P&spage=1

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.


In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.


Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul

Answer 6

My favorite is "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns, from 1785. It beautifully expresses the brotherhood between all living things. The Scottish dialect it's written in makes it a little tricky to understand, but somehow its message comes across despite that.

Answer 7

Hmmmm too many to name but here are a couple of my favorites by Robert Frost.Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.
The Road not Taken

Answer 8

In The Forest of The Night by William Black

Answer 9

The Desiderata. By Max Ehrmann.

Answer 10

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe