oursin's poetry meme

[truepenny]

What poets do you have on your shelves? For the purposes of this list, they should be there by your choice (as opposed to being texts for courses, etc) and be either the collected or selected works of one single poet (anthologies and collections do not count, nor do Selections from Works which include, but do not consist exclusively of, poetry).

I had to divide this into two parts. Part I is the poets whom I read for a class (or for the Master's Exam), but keep for the poetry (as distinct from Wordsworth, Pope, and Tennyson, whom I keep because, well, they're books and I keep them).

Charles Baudelaire
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
e. e. cummings
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
Yusef Komunyakaa
Mina Loy
William Shakespeare
Edmund Spenser
William Carlos Williams
W. B. Yeats

Part II are the poets I sought out on my own (often after having been exposed to their work in a class):
Margaret Atwood
Juanita Brunk
Fred Chappell
Lucille Clifton
Philip Dacey
Patricia Dobler
Mark Doty
Rita Dove
Stephen Dunn
T. S. Eliot
Louise Erdrich
Christopher Fry (I'm counting The Lady's Not for Burning as poetry.)
Marilyn Hacker
Patricia Hampl
Michael S. Harper
Ted Hughes
David Kirby
Edward Lear
Li-Young Lee
Don Marquis
Walter McDonald
Marianne Moore
Lisel Mueller
Naomi Shihab Nye
Sharon Olds
Wilfred Owen
Kenneth Patchen
Sylvia Plath
Stanley Plumly
Paula Rankin
Rainer Maria Rilke
Anne Sexton
Shel Silverstein
Elizabeth Spires
Wallace Stevens
Michael Van Walleghen

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

My own selection is, I realise, woefully lacking in anything particularly recent, except the Hacker. I still return to old favourites, but I'm bad about catching up with newer poets. And some of mine started out as set texts (or served their terms as set texts, anyway).