I ran across this list online yesterday—”100 Novels Everyone Should Read”—and while I only half-enjoy these kinds of lists, it hit me that someone ought to assemble a list of “100 Poetry Books Everyone Should Read.” No restrictions except the books need to be available in English, because—as with the Telegraph’s list of novels—the list should be global in scope.
In thinking through the shape of such a list, it struck me that we think of poetry in ways fundamentally different from novels. Whatever the quality of Flaubert’s writing in general, Madame Bovary is clearly a masterpiece. Some poems are viewed as masterpieces, but—with the exception of book-length narrative poems and sequences—are typically gathered into collections of poems that are not masterpieces. So what qualifies as “a poetry collection everyone should read”?
First of all, such a collection has to have masterpieces in it. Second, it has to constitute a peak of the poet’s powers, at least in a given phase of his or her work. (The Neruda of the Residencia en la Tierra period is not the Neruda of the Odas Elementales period, but the poet produced masterpieces in the characteristic style of each period.) Third, it must be a volume whose poems end up having influence far beyond the poet’s home nation. Some readers reckon Charles Olson, for example, to be a great American poet, and that may be; but I believe that Olson’s influence has not been terribly significant outside the United States. Finally, a poetry collection everyone should read ought to be a landmark volume apart from its masterpieces; that is, it should mark the advent of a style, a subject matter, and/or an angle of vision that remains compelling long after the poet’s death.
My previous sentence suggests that the list should not include living poets, which seems either myopic or unfair or both. Should the fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez still draws breath force One Hundred Years of Solitude off the novels list? If so, then we’d have to bar Tomas Tranströmer from our poetry list while Wislawa Szymborska, thanks to a visit from the Grim Reaper last year, may safely be listed. This smacks of an arbitrariness that takes some of the fun out of making and pondering such a list. So I’ve decided to let a few living poets through the turnstile and onto the list below, which I put forward in full awareness of its subjectivity—that is, with humility and a keen sense of contingency.
One last note. Translated poetry is almost always presented in the form of “selected” volumes, which is why many of the translations on my list are “selected poems,” and in a couple of cases even “collected poems.” In other cases, such as my entry for a pivotal volume in the work of Robert Browning, readers interested in finding the poems might do better looking into Browning’s Complete Poems rather than trying to locate a reprint of the individual book.
100 POETRY COLLECTIONS EVERYONE SHOULD READ
Anon., The Epic of Gilgamesh
Adonis, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems
Yehuda Amichai, Time (in The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai)
A. R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight
Bāsho, Back Roads to Far Towns
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (in The Complete Poems 1927-1979)
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Yves Bonnefoy, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve
Robert Browning, Men and Women, or Transcendentalism: A Poem in Twelve Books
Ernesto Cardenal, Cosmic Canticle
Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All
Catullus, The Poems of Catullus
C. P. Cavafy, Selected Poems
Paul Celan, From Threshold to Threshold
Dante, Inferno
Mahmoud Darwish, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
Emily Dickinson, The Selected Poems
Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches
Gunnar Ekelöf, Guide to the Underworld
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
Paul Éluard, Capital of Pain
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Selected Poems
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette
Ghalib, Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib
Eugene Guillevic, Carnac
H.D., Trilogy
Han Shan, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain
Seamus Heaney, North
Zbigniew Herbert, Mr. Cogito
Nazim Hikmet, Human Landscapes From My Country
Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments
Homer, The Iliad
Horace, Odes
Ted Hughes, Crow
Issa, Cup of Tea Poems
Rolf Jacobsen, The Silence Afterwards
Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream
Kabir, Ecstatic Poems
John Keats, Selected Poems
Vénus Khoury-Ghata, She Says
Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares
Philip Larkin, High Windows
Irving Layton, A Red Carpet in the Sun
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti
Denise Levertov, Life in the Forest
Li Ch’ing-chao, Complete Poems
Li Po, Selected Poems
Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York
Lucretius, The Nature of Things
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Osip Mandelstam, Stone
Harry Martinson, Aniara
Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend
W. S. Merwin, The Lice
Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems 1931-2004
Mirabai, For Love of the Dark One
Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems
Eugenio Montale, The Storm and Other Poems
Pablo Neruda, Heights of Macchu Picchu
Pablo Neruda, Selected Odes
Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Cesare Pavese, Hard Labor
Octavio Paz, Selected Poems
Pindar, Odes (Richard Lattimore translation)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Po Chu-i, Selected Poems
Ezra Pound, Personae
Sextus Propertius, Elegies
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems
Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Essential Rumi
Umberto Saba, Songbook
Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys
Sappho, Poems and Fragments
George Seferis, Collected Poems
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets
Shinkichi Takahashi, Triumph of the Sparrow
Shuntarō Tanikawa, Midnight in the Kitchen I Just Wanted to Talk to You
Alfonsina Storni, Selected Poems
Wislawa Szymborska, Miracle Fair
Georg Trakl, Song of the West
Tomas Tranströmer, The Half-Finished Heaven
Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems
Tu Fu, Selected Poems
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Selected Poems
César Vallejo, The Black Heralds
François Villon, Poems
Virgil, Aeneid
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Wang Wei, Laughing Lost in the Mountains
William Carlos Williams, Spring & All
William Butler Yeats, The Tower
I find myself resisting the temptation to list 10 or 20 anthologies as well. Another task for another time!
Thanks for the link, Tony.
Thank you for your list. I've put a link to your blog in http://www.PoemsPlease.me – Tony
I keep returning to Oppen but he doesn't move me the way Niedecker does; his poems strike me as exquisitely shaped statements, while hers are discoveries—continual discoveries, I mean, fresh and involving every time. I'd take Reznikoff over Oppen, too, and I actively dislike Zukofsky. Utterly subjective, needless to say. Some vibrations will always remain above or below one's range of
At least for 20th Century, and for the US, Dove got her chance, and she certainly got some screeching 'feedback', for her recent Penguin Anthology of 20C American Poetry. She got the most criticism for her lack of Plath (you've got her) and Ginsberg (you by-passed him); which was apparently due to the highway robbery of reprint/rights.<br /><br />For me, Dove's biggest miss was
Thanks for the comments, James. I was in a quandary about a lot of these choices. Certainly every poet you mention would be on an English-language list, but with "world poets" in mind I found myself cutting more and more poets from our own tradition. Maybe it's a reverse bias! Anyway, I'd love to see a "100" list of world poets put together by Rita Dove and Amiri
I applaud your list for the number of non-English language poets included. Of course, then we have to drill down to particular translations, which in way are different books.<br /><br />It does seem you skip from a smattering of ancients (Greek/Roman) over several centuries English poetry, with just a few stops (Shakespeare, Keats) along the way. Certainly one should have a bit of Sydney, Jonson,
I could be talked into trading Larkin for Ginsberg easily. (Larkin was no Ted Hughes.) O'Hara and Crane, I just don't see it. Thanks for the Parzival info. I found several copies but can't afford them. Damn.
Only verse translation of Parzival I know of is Edwin Zeydel's from 1969, U. of N. Carolina Press, hard to find. If you're going to include Plath and Irving Layton you've got to admit Ginsberg's Howl and yes, both O'Hara and Crane are 'world poets' as much as Martinson and Larkin, I think. Thanks again!
Wonderful! You've put your finger on holes in my own experience. I don't know Penna but will track him down. Wolfram I've read only in Helen Mustard's prose translation and so forgot he was writing in verse. Do you know a good verse translation? Crane I'm dubious about, O'Hara more so; neither seems like a "world poet" to me. Novalis's <i>Hymns</i>—yes …
Should be Novalis, Hymns to the Night, not Songs of the Night.
Nice list overall. Some arguable contenders: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival; Novalis, Songs of the Night; Hart Crane, White Buildings; Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems; Sandro Penna, Country Cemetery (over Saba). Thanks!