Top 50 Books of Poetry

The older I get, the more I realize that there is something elegant about a completed book of poetry.  I am not talking about a collection of poetry, but rather a series of poems that come together to form a completed series.  I once saw a complete exhibit of Kirchner at the Museum of Modern Art. The individual mural was nothing compared to the complete series standing in one room. The glorious streets of Berlin in the 1910s cannot be expressed in one scene. A woman's life cannot be expressed in one scene. The same is with poetry.

Once again this is solely based on what I have read and what mood I am in today.

Here's the list:

1.         The Sonnets/ William Shakespeare

           

            Could it be anything else. Sure, but it was written in the ear wedged between the epic and the metaphysical poets.The era of long driving narratives and sort separate poems devoid of any larger narrative. Shakespeare puts together a series of individual poems, which can stand alone, yet come together to form a much greater narrative.  The poems themselves are rarely stilted and flow well. The are perhaps one of the first examples of literature in the middle and modern era to be common not noble. They also at times are humorous such as sonnet 135:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I, that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus. 

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine? 

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will

One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.

Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Keep in mind that in Elizabethan English Will meant: William, desire, penis, sex, vagina, and the reach-around. He uses the word Will 13 times in 14 lines. Haha. Genitals are funny.

2.         Paterson/ William Carlos Williams

            A new era and a new mode of poetry.  Modernism in all of its glory.  It's the tale of city; more than that really; perhaps it is the city itself. At the very least, it is WCW at his best.

3.         The Prose and Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein

            Forgotten but Brilliant. While it is not purely poetry, it goes into a lost era of history.  One of bohemianism, pessiv/optimism. Alfred Lichtenstein creates unforgettable characters and weaves sound with grace atypical of German. The Archetype of a Lost Genre and Generation.

4.         Meditations in an Emergency/ Frank O’Hara

            While it does not contain the poem Having a Coke with You, it is still powerful and moving all the same.

5.         Geography III/ Elizabeth Bishop

            All those volcanoes must mean something.

6.         Kora in Hell/ William Carlos Williams

7.         Sir Gawainand the Green Knight/ the Pearl Poet

8.         The Carminaof Catullus

9.         The Sands from Urns/ Paul Celan

10.       Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions/ Maurice Manning

11.       Lunch Poems/ Frank O’Hara

12.       What Work is/ Philip Levine

13.       The Corpus of Old English Poetry    

14.       The Work of Galaktion Tabidze

15.       Howl/ Allen Ginsburg

16.       Collected Poems/ W.B. Yeats

17.       The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza/ Eugene Ostashevsky

18.       Leaves of Grass/ Walt Whitman

19.       Pierrort Lunaire/ Albert Girard

20.       Collected Poem/ John Keats

21.       Collected Poems/ Czeslaw Milosz

22.       Sonnets to Orpheus/ Rainer Maria Rilke

23.       Chicago Poems/ Carl Sandburg

24.       Collected Poems/ Nelly Sachs

25.       Dream Songs/ John Berryman

26.       Collected Poems/ Goethe

27.       Eternal Enemies/ Adam Zagajewski

28.       The Gold Cell/Sharon Olds

29.       Collected Poems/ Langston Hughes

30.       Des Knaben Wunderhorn/ Clemens Brentano

31.       The Rubaiyat/ Omar Khayyam

32.       Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trial/ Arielle Greenberg

33.       The Nibelungenlied/ Anonymous

34.       Collected Poems/ Mayakovsky

35.       From the Devotions/ Carl Phillips

36.       Kaddish/ Allen Ginsburg

37.       Gallows Songs/ Christian Morgenstern

38.       Collected Poems/ Donald Justice

39.       Poems/ Alan Dugan

40.       Collected Poems/ Philip Levine

41.       Pictures from Breughel and other Poems/ William Carlos Williams

42.       Ariel/ Sylvia Plath

43.       Hesperides/ Robert Herrick

44.       Collected Poems/ Edgar Allan Poe

45.       Joke, Cunning, and Revenge/ Friedrich Nietzsche

46.       Bucolics/ Maurice Manning

47.       Insomnia Diaries/ Bob Hicok

48.       The Prophet/ Khalil Gibran

49.       Collected Poems/ Bertolt Brecht

50.       Hotel Nirvana/ Harold Norse