From the article: Classic Poems Everyone Should Know
Your Poetry Guides have given two sets of essential poems everyone should know—a list of classics chosen by Margy Snyder, old poems that form the tradition of the English language, linger in the memory of English speakers and shape our thoughts, and a more personal list of poems important to Bob Holman. Now we’d like to ask your suggestions for adding to these lists. Choose the one poem that has been most important to you, and tell us about it, please. Share Yours.
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
- It would seem a gimme, but since it hasn’t been mentioned, and since it’s such a fantastic, important, and still vital song, yes, why not. My atoms are yours. Have a happy 100 Thousand Poets for Change day.
- —AndyH.
“The Ancient Mariner” by S.T. Coleridge
- A wonderful poem dealing with the supernatural but very much grounded in reality as it tells us what happens when man destroys nature.
- —Guest The Ancient Mariner
“The Dragon-Fly” by Tennyson
- To-day I saw the dragon-fly / Come from the wells where he did lie, / An inner impulse rent the veil / Of his old husk; from head to tail / Came out clear plates of sapphire mail, / He dried his wings; like gauze they grew; / Through crofts and pastures wet with dew / A living flash of light he flew.
- —Guest The Dragon-Fly
“The Present Crisis”
- ...by James Russell Lowell. To me, this is one of the greatest poems in the English language. It dealt with the issue of freedom and anti-slavery. Favorite lines: Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
- —Guest James Russell Lowell
“Rhyme” by Robert Pinsky
- The rhythm of the poem, the language of it. The way it circles back from beginning to end to beginning. The way each thing connects to the one before it and the one following it. I had the privilege to hear Pinsky recite this poem, from memory, and it was one of the best readings of a poem that I have ever heard.
- —castephen
“Sonnet” by Elizabeth Bishop
- Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet” is as neat and piercing as a stab to the hear. “I am in need of music...” what an incredible opening line!
- —djbot_baghostus
