50 Best Books - Poetry

In his final choice of 10 texts comprising his top 50 books, the Principal concentrates on poetry.

Selected Letters & Notebooks Lord Byron 1810 - 1824

I read this in Rome after graduating and at the time it seemed the funniest, wisest, most scandalous and lordly book I’d ever read. I still love it many years later. Byron’s romantic inclinations are laid bare in all their tenderness and cynicism, as are his republican politics and his love of literature as a civilized pursuit. A great read. Byron was a naughty boy but he writes like an angel in texts that are better than his poems.

Paris Spleen Charles Baudelaire (tr. Louise Varese) 1869

See here the birth of the ‘prose poem’ – short, intense ‘poems’ written in dense, elliptical prose that liberates the form and allows a certain imaginative licence – such as the man who loses his halo in the mud; a man beaten by his wife for dreamily watching clouds instead of eating his soup. In the context of a city, Baudelaire declares how multitude and solitude can be the same thing, inspiring Walter Benjamin’s work.   

Collected Poems Constantin Cavafy (tr. Avi Sharon) 1896 - 1932

I lived in Greece for three years, where the influence of Cavafy is everywhere. His 154 canonical poems divide into historical anecdotes and personal tales of forbidden love. He has the great trick of telling the historical poems in the present tense and the contemporary love poems in the past tense, so making one more immediate and the other peculiarly distant. I love his work, short poems that conjure whole worlds.

Selected Poems Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell) 1905 - 1926

My favourites of the great German poet are his early imagistic lyrics, such as the panther in the cage in Paris, the dressing of a corpse, the touching description of a blind woman. His later Sonnets to Orpheus and his Duino Elegies can, to my taste, seem a little less fresh, but there are beautiful things throughout the oeuvre from his always questing intelligence. Stephen Mitchell’s translations are great.

Poems Bertolt Brecht (tr. J. Willett) 1913 - 1956

Political poetry is usually terrible because it’s too preachy and made up its mind. But Brecht’s political poetry - aimed against the Nazi regime - is caustic, witty, insightful, and poignant – for example, how he keeps a suitcase packed on top of the wardrobe in exile, just in case the Fascists catch up with him. Uneven and overabundant, his poems can be loose, but when the focus is right, he’s unmatchable. 

Collected Poems T.S. Eliot 1917 - 1964

No loose words in Eliot’s poetry. His first book, beginning with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, is his best – its unforgettable opening line about an evening sky set out like a patient etherised upon a table. An incredible image when most poets were still rehearsing rural platitudes. You don’t always understand Eliot but you respond to the excitement of the language and its form. 

Selected Poems Yehuda Amichai (tr. Stephen Mitchell) 1955 - 2000

The Israeli poet was as popular among Arab readers as with his own countrymen, and it’s not hard to see why, the way humanity shines through his verses. His images tend not to conform to patterns but create spectacular fireworks within poems. I like the asymmetrical shape of his verses. If you want to try him, start with ‘The Diameter of the Bomb’ and ‘The Rustle of History’s Wings…’

Selected Poems Frank O’Hara 1950 - 1964

I spent three years of my life completing a PhD on the New York poet. He wrote a lot in his short life of 40 years, with a flowering around 1959-61. Reading his best poems is to understand what it is to be alive. He is the most companionable and chatty of poets, endlessly curious about the world including food, buildings, cinema, painting, and the pleasures of coffee and Coca Cola.

Life Studies and For the Union Dead Robert Lowell 1959 - 1964

Lowell’s two best books have been issued in one volume, and his relaxedly formal and discursive verses about his close family and his mental breakdowns have earned him the tag of a ‘confessional’ poet. But these are no mere diary entries. They are absolutely crafted, densely written, with images developed in complex patterns. Great technique, making the most of sometimes painfully personal content. 

Selected Poems Seamus Heaney 1969 - 2013

I saw Heaney read several times and he could charm an audience with the lilt of his voice and power of his personality. But it is the complex synthesis of poetry, politics and personal anecdote that make him one of the greatest modern poets. The way the trajectory of each individual poem mirrors the architecture of a whole collection is a marvel of controlled form. Justly awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 

If I had to choose only one of the above it would be the poems by Frank O’Hara.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO