It's a question I often get from people first getting to know me, they learning what I've studied and so going for the most obvious question possible:
So, what's your favourite poem? It's a question I'm loathe to answer most of the time, for obvious reasons, not least of which is my hesitance to name "favourites." One also ends up realizing-- true to anyone's experience-- how much one's answers to such a dreadful question are likely to be different from one day to the next. To deny, though, the influence of certain writings on one's life, and one's way of thinking about literature and indeed the world, is also to evade a legitimate question, because as much as one may admire or respect certain poems or poets, one might not be all that significantly influenced by them, while others will lurk like deep, dark secrets in the back of one's mind forever and ever. In effect, they become part of one's genetic code, for better or for worse. Graham Greene once said he had to stop reading Joseph Conrad for twenty years because he feared Conrad would have "colonized his style," and he'd never have established his own literary voice. Look at so many of the youngsters writing poetry these days, and you'll see the typical indicators of their colonization, more often than not by the usual suspects-- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Leonard Cohen, e.e. cummings, to name a few. I decided, then, that it might be worthwhile to compose a list of ten of my favourite-- in most strictly subjective sense-- poems through the ages, poems that have nestled themselves into whatever nooks and crannies of my gangrenous heart, and which will always be there in some form or another. I decided to limit the list to ten, keeping in mind that such a list might change in a week or a month or a year as certain poems become more prominent and others less so. Here's what I came up with, in no particular order:
- Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"
- Thomas Campion, "There Is A Garden In Her Face"
- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
- Mark Strand, Dark Harbor (excerpts and short discussion here)
- A. E. Housman, "To An Athlete Dying Young"
- Leonard Cohen, "You Have The Lovers"
- John Dryden, "Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (1687)
- Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd"
- Thomas Hardy, "The Voice"
- Leigh Hunt, "Rondeau"
And yes, it probably is a bit odd that so many of the Usual Suspects aren't there: no Donne or Shakespeare or Yeats or Browning or Dickinson or Thomas, no Milton or Tennyson or Pope or Heaney, and not even Lowell or Wyatt or Howard or Layton or Bob Dylan. There are no women on the list, a fact that may offend some but does not surprise me. But when it comes down to it, I guess these are my Desert Island poems, as it were. Looking at the list now, I'm almost tempted to schaden-Freud myself, to remark upon what these choices say about me (in not necessarily flattering senses), but I'm not going to bother. What's interesting, I think, is that all of these poems are very strongly end-stopped, all of them given to clarity of expression and forcefulness of line, though almost all of them tend to be meditative in nature, particularly about love and death, the great emotional end-stops. I suspect this suggests something about my own poetic sensibilities, but I'll leave those possible inferences unstated. All in all, though, it's an interesting exercise. It makes one look again at the rocks from which one has been hewn, to which one all-but-inevitably returns. Which, of course, prompts the question:
so what are your ten favourite poems? And, perhaps more interestingly, are you willing to name them, or do you keep them in the closet with your mothballs and natty sweaters?
As my "favourite," as much as I have one, I'd probably have to lean on experience and fact. Years ago I was delivering a lecture on figures of speech to a first-year class, and I decided to use Stevens' "Idea of Order..." as my focal poem. It's likely telling what happened: after I told the students to open their anthologies so they could follow along as I read the poem aloud, a sea of heads went into their books, all of them bobbing up one by one and staying up as they realized I wasn't reading from the text. You could have heard a pin drop during that reading, and by the end no one was looking at their books. I guess that just about says it all, doesn't it? Too bad my memory isn't good enough to do that with more poems; if it could, I'd probably be the next Harold Bloom. Naomi Wolf and nutty psychoanalytic theories, of course, excepted.
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