Poetry: Where to Start
Poets to start with, most in collections of their poems, plus single books by Whitman, Frost and Barrett Browning.
- You get the sonnets’ shifting voices, from tender devotion to jealousy and self-reproach, alongside the lush, mischievous stories of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Read it slowly; the wordplay can feel dense, but individual lines keep opening up long after you’ve put it down.
- You get a man in his early twenties writing lines so lush you can almost taste them, autumn's cider oozing from the press, the nightingale fading over dark fields. Read the odes slowly, out loud if you can; Keats rewards lingering, not skimming.
- Poetry that talks straight to you, sometimes a century ahead of schedule, like in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry where he addresses future readers by name, meaning you. Whitman rambles and repeats himself, sure, but read Song of Myself aloud and see if your chest doesn't loosen.
- Frost at his least postcard-pretty: long blank-verse conversations between farm neighbors, husbands and wives who can't quite say what they mean. Home Burial will wreck you a little, and Mending Wall is slyer than the line everyone quotes.
- Yeats is worth living with slowly, a few poems at a night: you get the young dreamer of Innisfree, then watch him harden into the old man of Sailing to Byzantium, and the lines stick in your head whether you invite them or not. Skip it if you need plainspoken poetry.
- You get Prufrock measuring out life in coffee spoons, the yellow fog, the shored fragments of The Waste Land. Difficult, yes, and worth the difficulty; read aloud, these poems lodge in the ear for good.
- You get a remarkably candid record of love taking shape, from guarded doubt to the famous “How do I love thee?” and its steady, almost prayerful answer. The language is ornate and intensely Victorian, but the fear of being unworthy and the relief of being chosen still feel startlingly close.
- You get the Ancient Mariner with his dead albatross and glittering eye up front, then Wordsworth talking about leech-gatherers and a stubborn little girl who insists her dead siblings still count. Quiet, plainspoken poems mostly, so read it slow, a few at a time.
- Poe's poems are best read aloud at night, when the hypnotic drumbeat of The Raven and the sad chime of Annabel Lee can really work on you. It's a small body of work, moody and musical, and if gothic melancholy isn't your thing, skip it.
- Hughes gets blues and jazz onto the page: The Weary Blues, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, lines that look simple and land hard. If poetry usually feels like homework, his voice reads like someone talking straight to you.
- You can read it in an hour, then find lines like the moving finger writes surfacing years later at odd moments. All that wine and roses talk is really about death, gently faced, so it suits a quiet evening more than a cheerful mood.