A Poet’s Ideal Library
Thursday May 3, 2007
In October 2006, Jim Finnegan, one of the moderators of the NewPoetry email discussion list, posed this question to the members of the list:
If you were to stock a poet’s personal library, filling it with the essential and odd books a poet should own or have ready access to, what titles would be in it? (Note: no books of poems allowed... since those books are presumed to be in libris already.)The suggestions of the NewPoetry poets grew into a virtual library, which we are building room by room here at About Poetry for you, dear readers, to wander and browse in. Our first room:
Comments
Just the top 6? There will be more, won’t there?
Of course! This is just the beginning — only the dictionaries and general references. I’m working my way through Jim’s categories, adding annotations and shopping links, and hoping to post one sublist a week, so that in a couple of months the whole library will appear here.