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What Are The 10 Greatest Poems?
Poetry seems to be almost dead in the modern world. I do not think that this is true. The poets of today are songwriters.
What do you think are the ten greatest poems? My preliminary list:
- King David, Psalm 13
- King David, Psalm 22
- Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
- Henry van Dyke/Beethoven, Hymn to Joy, (musical performance with lyrics; music by Beethoven)
- Macauley, Horatius at the Bridge
- Whitman, O Captain, My Captain
- John McCrae, In Flanders Fields
- Kipling, If
- Wordsworth, She Was A Phantom Of Delight
- Trent Reznor, Hurt (musical performance by Johnny Cash, with lyrics)
It was hard to keep Kipling down to two. It was really hard to keep King David down to two.
As with my post on Great Books, I ask that you not just toss out poems that you think are good. Prioritize. I’d like to see your Top Ten list — or if you prefer, what you would add to and take off from my list.
Published in Literature
I’d replace Ode to Joy, a totalitarian anthem, with the one that starts, Roses are Red…
Oh, I see you said Hymn to Joy. Maybe that’s different. I don’t really know.
Same music — totally different lyrics.
Any Limerick with “Nantucket”.
Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay –
“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden
And Tehillim are sui generis. They do not fall under the heading of mere mortal poetry.
Isaiah 61 – Beauty for Ashes
(My favorite chapter in scripture, so powerful in its imagery and symbolism)
Psalm 23 – The Lord is my Shepherd
Twila Paris – How Beautiful (its pivot of the body of Christ from the physical to the symbol)
Again, I’m fluffy on this stuff and only read children’s poetry like Robert Frost. I liked Whitman.
If you asked for top 10 pieces of music, i might pull that one off with something more substantial than pop music.
This is one of my favorites:
The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean by Robinson Jeffers
Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.
The old monster snuffled, “Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,”
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.
“The world’s in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,”
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.
“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,”
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.
I think I’d substitute Sons of Martha for If and still keep your Kipling to two.
Paradise Lost should be on the list . . .
This is why I can’t do poetry.
Somewhere in literary history, it became gauche to write with rhythm and meter. A lot of American poetry (outside of children’s) has no rhythm and it is just awful to read (as poetry).
Make it prose. It isn’t poetry.
(I don’t mean to pick on you, but that piece is so emblematic of what I mean. The imagery is pleasing, though.)
I would drop the Whitman and add The Second Coming by Yeats.
Maybe drop one of the Kiplings (probably If) and add something by Burns; Tam O’Shanter or To a Mouse.
The Second Coming by Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This was written in 1919, a year after the first world war, a time when the world should be looking to the future with optimism. Yet Yeats envisioned a coming nightmare. And what is that Rough Beast?
To me, poetry has to have rhythm and rhyming.
Being a Heathen I have not read the Psalms. So in No particular Order
Tennyson: Ulysses.
Donne: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales.
Yeats: The Second Coming
Frost: The Road Not Taken
Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn
KJV: Psalm 23
Shakespeare: Sonnet 30
Arnold: Dover Beach
Blake: The Tyger/The Lamb
Trouble is, if you asked me next week, my list might be different. And there are many good suggestions in previous comments too.
Agreed. Poetry is highly suggestive of mood and there is so much that is great.
Oh Tennyson! My favorite poem is the Lady of Shallott.
I also love Lord Byron’s The Fall of Sennacherib.
It is my favorite, too. (Shameless self-promotion alert.) But I think Ulysses is, in its underpinnings, perhaps a greater one.
So do I.
I don’t understand the attraction of this one. I agree that many people find it moving. I think that the “rough beast” represents despair and nihilism, after the abandonment of Christianity. He wants a second coming, but doesn’t actually believe in the first coming and doesn’t believe that anything good can actually come. At least that’s the way it looks to me.
Another good one. Thanks. Here‘s a link.
I think that Psalm 23 would be the first choice of most people, among the Psalms. I like it, but prefer others with more angst.
Here is #1 on my list, Psalm 13:
I find this extraordinary because David is not hiding his pain, fear, and disappointment. He’s not pretending to be happy in disaster. Nor does he get an answer. He firmly decides to trust in God, in the midst of the catastrophe of life.
Nice list. I would agree with most, but I have four favorite poets that would have to make any list of mine: Roger Zelazny, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Walter Brooks writing as Freddy the Pig.
The Kiplings are great; but in my list I would replace them with two that make my hair stand on end: Recessional and The Song of the Dead.
Also, I consider the choice of Psalms 13 & 22 a typographical error. You obviously meant Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd”.
When I finally listened to the entire Old Testament, not long ago, one of my major disappointments was that the other Psalms were not at the level of that one. Mostly, they seemed to be of the (unselfconsciously contradictory) form, “O Lord be merciful to me — and mercilessly punish my enemies.“
Having freed up one of the King David slots, I would include William Dunbar‘s Lament for the Makaris.
I don’t know that he “wants a second coming.” I think it’s more that he believes that the opposing forces of history (outer and inner gyres) expand and contract against each other, and that he saw the end of one age and the beginning of another. The end of science, rationalism, civility (many different ideas), and the uprising of a more primal and mystical force. Many think it’s foolish, some think it’s profound. I think it’s interesting. And provocative.
All the rest on my list are song lyrics so they don’t count!
#24 — If I had to guess, Yeats is looking toward the rebirth of pagan barbarism (the Sphinx) as the Christian era (twenty centuries of stony sleep) draws to a close.
Note that in 1919, there were communist revolutions going on in various places.
Nope, no typo. I’d probably put #23 among my top 5 psalms, but not in the top 2.
Shakespeare’s sonnets.
My favorite anthology is Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Poignant and at times humorous dealing with memories of every day past life. That’s why Our Town is one of my favorite plays.
Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie
Evangeline: A Tale Of Acadie – Poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,–
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.
Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.