THE WRITTEN WORD
Poetry Collections
12 books
Twelve collections for readers who want to engage with poetry seriously — not as a school assignment, but as a form that can do things with language and experience that prose can't. The list covers American poetry, British poetry, the modernist tradition, the confessional tradition, the war poetry tradition, and a few collections that resist easy categorization. Poetry is the most compressed literary form — the one that demands the most from a reader's attention — and the collections here were selected for their accessibility to serious readers who don't already have a background in the form, as well as for their quality. Start with any of them. The form will open from there.
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Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Whitman published the first edition on July 4th, 1855 — another non-accident — and the book is his attempt to write the great democratic American poem, a work that would contain the whole country: its land, its people, its noise, its contradictions, its body, its soul. It succeeded so completely that during China's May Fourth Movement of 1919, revolutionary intellectuals on the other side of the world read Whitman as a call to arms — a poet who had bottled American democratic energy so purely that it translated across every ocean and every ideology. "Song of Myself" alone — the opening poem, fifty-two sections of rolling, incantatory free verse — is an experience unlike anything else in American literature.
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Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
In 1902 a nineteen-year-old Austrian cadet named Franz Kappus wrote to Rilke asking for his assessment of the cadet's poems. Rilke wrote back ten letters over five years that constitute the most direct account of the creative and philosophical life available in prose: why solitude is necessary, how to live inside uncertainty without resolving it prematurely, what it means to take one's inner life seriously when the world prefers you not to. Around 90 pages and technically prose letters rather than poems — the unexpected angle entry on this list. The AoM reader who thinks poetry requires a particular sensitivity he doesn't have will find Rilke arguing the opposite: that the capacity for serious inner attention is not a gift but a practice, and that the practice is available to anyone willing to be alone with difficult questions long enough to let them develop. Cross-seeds with the Philosophy list.
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The Essential Rumi
Jalal al-Din Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)
Rumi was a thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic whose work was translated by Coleman Barks in the 1990s into American English loose enough to read as contemporary poetry and precise enough to carry the original ecstatic argument: that the human longing for meaning is itself the evidence of what it is longing for. The poems cover love, loss, God, wine, and the specific condition of being alive in a body that will not last, and they do it with a directness that makes most Western religious poetry seem decorative by comparison. Around 302 pages and the international spiritual entry on this list. The reader who approaches this skeptically because he has seen Rumi quotations on inspirational posters will find the actual poems considerably more demanding and considerably more rewarding than the excerpts suggest.
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Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition
Rudyard Kipling
Kipling wrote the most directly masculine poetry in the English language and has been paying the cultural price for it ever since. If is the most widely reprinted poem in the English language after the Bible for a reason — it is a complete account of what serious manhood requires, in sixteen lines. But the full verse collection goes considerably further: Tommy documents the specific contempt British society showed its soldiers in peacetime; Gunga Din inverts the racial hierarchy of empire to make its moral argument; Danny Deever covers a military execution with a ballad's rhythm and a journalist's specificity. Around 700 pages in the definitive edition. The AoM entry on this list: the poet who wrote directly about duty, empire, courage, and the common soldier without apology, and whose cultural exile makes him more worth reading than his rehabilitation would.
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The Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters
Masters published this in 1915 — the dead of a fictional Illinois town, Spoon River, each speaking their own epitaph from the grave. Around 260 pages and the deep cut entry on this list: largely forgotten outside American literature survey courses despite being the most readable extended poem sequence in the American tradition. The format is perfect for the non-poetry reader — every poem is under a page, each stands alone, and the cumulative effect of two hundred voices speaking their final truth about their lives produces something no single poem could achieve. The banker who admits he stole from his clients. The soldier who died for a cause he didn't believe in. The woman who says exactly what her marriage was. No obscurity, no difficulty, no period apparatus required. Published 110 years ago and still the most honest thing written about small-town American life.
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The Poetry of Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Frost wrote about New England — the stone walls, the birch trees, the hired men, the neighbors — with a plainness that concealed a philosophical precision most readers don't notice until the second or third reading. The Road Not Taken is the most misread poem in the American canon: it is not about the virtue of nonconformity but about the human tendency to construct false narratives of choice after the fact, which is a considerably darker argument. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is about the pull of death. Mending Wall is about the specific intelligence of traditional boundaries. Around 600 pages in the complete collected poems. The accessible canonical entry on this list — the poet who sounds like plain speech and means something more precise than plain speech every time. The AoM reader who thinks he knows Frost will find he doesn't.
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Good Poems
Garrison Keillor (ed.)
Keillor spent years reading poems on his radio program A Prairie Home Companion and selected the ones that worked — poems that could be read aloud to a general audience without explanation and land on the first pass. The selection runs from Walt Whitman to Sharon Olds, organized by subject rather than period, and the effect is a comprehensive introduction to American and British poetry that never feels like an introduction. Around 476 pages. The explicit entry point entry on this list: the book for the man who wants to try poetry but doesn't know where to start and doesn't want a curriculum. Keillor's brief introductions explain what each poem does without over-explaining it. The reader who finds three poems he likes in this collection has found three poets worth pursuing further, which is what a good anthology is supposed to accomplish.
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Selected Poems
W.B. Yeats
Yeats is the most beautiful poet in the English language after Shakespeare and the most accessible of the genuinely great ones — no period obscurity, no apparatus required, just the full weight of a major intelligence applied to love, Irish nationalism, aging, heroism, and the specific terror of history. The Second Coming was written in 1919 about the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and has been correctly applied to every subsequent moment of civilizational anxiety. Easter 1916 covers the Irish uprising with a complexity that neither condemns nor celebrates. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death covers the specific fatalism of a man flying combat missions without believing in the cause. Around 240 pages in the Scribner selected edition. The canonical literary entry on this list and the one most likely to produce the specific sensation of reading a line and understanding something you previously only felt.
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Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes
Hughes spent twenty-five years writing poems about his marriage to Sylvia Plath — who killed herself in 1963, leaving him with their two children and a reputation as the man responsible — and published all eighty-eight of them in 1998, six months before he died of cancer. The collection is the most emotionally raw and direct poetry in contemporary English: specific about the arguments, the children, the specific day she died, and the specific guilt of a man who had forty years to think about what he could have done differently. Around 196 pages and the uncomfortable entry on this list. The AoM reader who avoids this because of Plath's cultural status as feminist martyr will miss the best collection of love and grief poetry published in English in the last fifty years. Hughes is describing what it costs to survive someone you loved and failed simultaneously.
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Love Is a Dog from Hell
Charles Bukowski
Bukowski wrote about drinking, women, horse racing, bad jobs, and Los Angeles with a directness that made the literary establishment uncomfortable and made everyone else feel that someone had finally said the thing plainly. This 1977 collection is the right entry point: the romantic poems are rawer than the later work, the self-pity is better controlled, and the humor surfaces more often. Around 284 pages and the accessible entry point on this list — the poet most likely to make a man who has never liked poetry say that he likes this. Bukowski is not the greatest poet on this list. He is the most direct, which for a reader coming to poetry cold is more useful than greatness. The reader who finishes this and wants something harder goes to Whitman; the reader who wants something more controlled goes to Frost.
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The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Jon Silkin (ed.)
The men who fought the First World War produced the greatest war poetry in the English language — not because war is romantic but because it isn't, and the poets who survived the Somme and Passchendaele had seen something that demanded a new kind of language to describe. Wilfred Owen on the specific sound of a gas attack. Siegfried Sassoon on the generals who sent men to die from chateaux forty miles behind the line. Edward Thomas on the England he was leaving. Isaac Rosenberg writing from the trenches until he didn't come back. Silkin's anthology collects the essential work with editorial notes that place each poem in its context. Around 400 pages and the anchor entry on this list — the most direct entry point into serious poetry for the reader who has never looked for one. Cross-seeds with the WWI History list.
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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
Neruda wrote these twenty poems in 1924 at nineteen years old and they made him the most celebrated poet in Latin America before he was twenty-five. Under 100 pages in the bilingual Penguin edition — Spanish on the left, English on the right — and the shortest entry on this list. The love poems are direct and physical in ways that most canonical poetry avoids, the despair in the final song is specific rather than decorative, and the whole thing can be read in an hour. The international entry and the short entry simultaneously. The reader who wants more Neruda goes to the Selected Odes, which apply the same directness to ordinary objects — tomatoes, socks, a pair of scissors — and are equally good. Cross-seeds with the Latin American History list.