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

Top 50 Novels

While working on the list I realized several telling things about life, literature, and myself.  Perhaps most telling about this list is it is almost all men, all western hemisphere, mostly hetero.  It's my belief that this list will look vastly different in 200 years, if people still write that is. Society has been dominated by men, more men have been writers, and men have dominated literary criticism, ensuring that male writers would gain fame and prestige.

So much of the literature that I have read over the years has been in the form of poetry, short stories, or drama.  The novel as a western form is new. Poetry has been around since writing (the bible, the Odyssey, and practically everything pre-antiquity), and Drama has existed since the Classical Greece. The novel as we know it, has been around only for about 400 years. The Mahabharata, the bible, the Volsunga saga, the Avesta, the Bacchae, Antigone, the Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, etc are all disqualified from this list.  So that pushes my list to being mostly (straight) white men in the last 400 years from Western Europe.

Here is the list of top 50 Novels that I have read: 

1.         The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum/ Heinrich Boll

This is one of my favorite Novels. Well actually, according to this list it is my favorite novel.  It has every thing: Action, adventure, terrorism, social political strife, and awesome puns. Here is how Wikipedia  describes the book:

The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. Later it turns out that he is not a bank robber: he is a deserter from the Army who had stolen money from his camp before deserting. Ultimately she shoots the reporter, after he arrives at her house for an interview that she requested. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung (The Newspaper), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.

Awesome.

2.         Night/ Elie Wiesel

Night is perhaps the most awful novel in history. No other novel have I ever read that goes into stronger details of human suffering. If there is only one novel every person should read, I would say it has to Night.

With the events of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, the message is still one that needs to be learned.

3.          Candide/ Voltaire

A brutal satire that could have been written in a more contemporary era.  It preserved the atrocities of its day from the auto-da-fe (in 1755 Portugal burnt the heretics because apparently the all loving all merciful all powerful god sent a tsunami (after a quick bit of research there may not have been an actual auto da fe after the Lisbon Quake, but they still were using the auto da fe during this time) to the horrors of colonialism/imperialism/slavery.

Voltaire even refutes Leibniz (Pangloss von Thunder-ten-Tronckh). Yay.

4.         The Metamorphosis/ Franz Kafka

While it is technically a novella I have included it on the list because it surpasses the form of a short story and is more similar in style to the fragment novels Kafka left.What other novel opens with a brief description of Venus in Furs only to spin deeper into an Existential Crisis. I also like to think whether or not it was intended, Kafka's Metamorphosis is a corruption of Nietzsche's 3 metamorphoses. Instead of the Camel (Altruism), Lion (Nihilism), and Child (Positivism) Kafka's are Altruist (Masochism), Cockroach (Nihilism), and Dead Cockroach (umm dead?).

5.         Slaughterhouse-Five/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The only American to round out the top 5. Slaughterhouse-Five has one devastating quote in it. I will not reveal which one.  Here is how wikipedia describes it:

Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars and he is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.

Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a nonlinear narrative. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories.

As Billy travels—or believes he travels—forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro.

A+ Mr Vonnegut.

6.         The Great Gatsby/ F. Scott Fitzgerald

7.         Steppenwolf/ Hermann Hesse

8.         The Stranger/ Albert Camus

9.         Huckleberry Finn/ Mark Twain

10.       The Lord of the Flies/ William Golding

11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison

12.       Tess D’Urbervilles/ Thomas Hardy

13.       The Trial/ Franz Kafka

14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde

15.       Catcher in the Rye/ J.D. Salinger

16.       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/ Lewis Carroll

17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin

18.       Demian/ Hermann Hesse

19.       Gulliver’s Travel/ Jonathan Swift

20.       The Watchmen/ Alan Moore

21.       D’alembert’s Dream/ Denis Diderot

22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee

23.       All Quiet on the Western Front/ Erich Maria Remarque

24.       Notes from the Underground/ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

25.       The Crying of Lot 49/ Thomas Pynchon

26.       The Hunchback of Notre Dame/ Victor Hugo

27.       Madam Bovary/ Gustave Flaubert

28.       One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest/ Ken Kesey

29.       High Fidelity/Nick Hornby

30.       The Hobbit/ J.R.R. Tolkien

31.       A Clockwork Orange/ Anthony Burgess

32.       Montauk/ Max Frisch

33.       Middlesex/ Jeffery Eugenides

34.       Letters from an Unknown Woman/ Stefan Zweig

35.       The Scarlet Letter/ Nathaniel Hawthorne

36.       The Old Man and the Sea/ Ernest Hemmingway

37.       Thus Spoke Zarthustra/ Friedrich Nietzsche

38.       1984/ George Orwell

39.       The Sound and the Fury/ William Faulkner

40.       The Tin Drum/ Gunter Grass

41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson

42.       The Hounds of Baskerville/ Arthur Conan Doyle

43.       Venus in Furs/ Leopold Sacher-Von Masoch

44.       Siddhartha/ Hermann Hesse

45.       Of Mice and Men/ John Steinbeck

46.       Cat’s Cradle/ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

47.       V for Vendetta/ Alan Moore

48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling

49.       The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe/ CS Lewis

50.       Animal Farm/ George Orwell

Obviously this list is entirely shit.  Well the notion of ranking literature is shit, but I was still wanting to make my own list based on the literature that I have read in order to see what it say about myself.  Most of my favorite literature is not on this list as I absolutely love reading poetry and drama.  Also at this point in my life I prefer a short story or a collection of short stories to a full novel. And let's not forget the volumes of critical theory and philosophy that are absent from the list.

The big exceptions to the Straight White Men Rule are as follows:

 11.       The Invisible Man/ Ralph Ellison
14.       The Portrait of Dorian Gray/ Oscar Wilde
17.       Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austin
22.       To Kill a Mockingbird/ Harper Lee
41.       Comet in Moominland/ Tove Jansson
48.       The Harry Potter Series/ J.K. Rowling

I haven't read Wuthering Heights, I dislike Silas Mariner, My Antonia is so pedestrian... so lay off. And next on my Docket:

Billy Budd/ Herman Melville
Rereading Danton's Death/ Georg Buchner
The Temptation of Saint Anthony/ Gustave Flaubert
Swann's Way/ Marcel Proust