<p>I just started getting into reading some poetry (we had to read Whitman for class and things just spiraled from there) and I want your recommendations. I love love love what little of Ginsberg, Whitman and Neruda that I've read-- Dickinson's style doesn't really do it for me though. There's just SO much out there that I don't even know where to start. Who do you guys like/why?</p>
<p>SPEAKING OF GINSBERG...</p>
<p>Word on Ginsberg.</p>
<p>i love e.e. cummings and 'since feeling is first'</p>
<p>i love it because if you try and analyze it, you will not understand it. also, it reads backwards and forwards.</p>
<p>I admire E.A. Poe's writing style (especially in The Raven). This style of writing has influenced my own poetry in several ways.</p>
<p>e. e. cummings, Poe are tow of my favourite as well. I also like Langston Hughes's "Harlem- A Dream Deffered".</p>
<p>I personally like Sylvia Plath, especially 'Mad Girl's Love Song' and 'Daddy'.</p>
<p>My favorite e e cummings poem (typed out, because I have it in a book but literally CANNOT find it online):</p>
<p>POEM(or
"the divine right of majorities
that illegitimate offspring of the
divine right of kings")
here are five simple facts no sub
human superstate ever knew
(1)we sans love equals mob
love being youamiare(2)
the holy miraculous difference between
firstrate & second implies nonth
inkable enormousness by con
trast with the tiny stumble from second to tenth
rate(3)as it was in the begin
ning it is now and always will be or
the onehundredpercentoriginal sin
cerity equals perspicuity(4)
Only The Game Fish Swims Upstream &(5)
unbeingdead isn't beingalive
-e.e.cummings</p>
<p>I'm also a Plath and Whitman fan, and I don't usually like Dickenson but Sic Transit Gloria Mundi is great.</p>
<p>^^ we have a lot in common then. </p>
<p>I don't like E.E. Cummings that much but my two favs are Poe and Hughes. I actually wrote my critical analysis for TASP on a Langston Hughes's poem. </p>
<p>My favorite poem is "Moody Blues" bye Langston Hughes.</p>
<p>by my ^^ i meant I<3Pi</p>
<p>I have to bring some T.S. Eliot love in here:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html</a></p>
<p>"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"--heartbreaking and amazing at the same time. Neruda is good too, though when they are translated a little bit of the poetic quality gets taken away. I don't like Dickinson either. There are a buch of poems that I can appreciate for their writing etc., but only a few truly move me. Eliot certainly can.</p>
<p>I'm sorry but I absolutely hate that poem. It put me to sleep.</p>
<p>Haha...I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then. What made it bad?</p>
<p>Neruda is awesome in his native tongue.</p>
<p>Am I the only person here who likes Dr. Seuss? :D</p>
<p>^^ Dr.Seuss is awesome. "Green Eggs and Ham"; gotta love it, lol. I also like "The Kraken" by Alfred Lord Tennyson & "Nella Nebbia" by Giovanni Pascoli.</p>
<p>Naw man, Seuss is WAY too psychedelic for me.</p>
<p>Plath, Emily Dickenson, ee Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, etc.</p>
<p>And Scheherezade by Richard Siken:</p>
<p>Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.</p>
<p>Conversation, by Ai</p>
<p>We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?</p>
<p>I really like this one =)</p>
<p>This one's amazing:</p>
<p>One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop</p>
<p>The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.</p>