Here are some of my poetry books. My favourite poets are Wilfred Owen, Phillip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manly Hopkins.
I had a bit of a shaky start with Philip Larkin when I had to study him for my A levels, but he has grown on me since. I love his spring poem "The Trees":
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Wilfred Owen is, of course, an extremely well known war poet. Who can forget his wonderful use of imagery in so many poems. Soldiers mining war to find peace like miners searching for coal. The machine gun pattering out hasty orisons.
Emily Dickinson spent her life hidden away from the world. I am not sure if knowing about her life changed the way I view her poetry but, in any case, they are gems. This is the first part of "Hope":
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
Gerard Manly Hopkins is not talked about much these days but he wrote some beautiful poetry. My favourite is "The Windhover" (the kestrel):
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
