A few of my favourite poems:
i sing of Olaf glad and big (e.e. cummings):
Tichborne’s Elegy (Chidiock Tichborne):
Résumé (Dorothy Parker).
Oh, by the way, CLI by William Shakespeare is more properly known as “Ode to My Willy.”
There’s a lot of poems I like, but Richard Cory and Kipling’s Recessional immediately come to mind.
The Tyger by William Blake. Wonderful to read aloud.
Jenny Kiss’d Me by Leigh Hunt.
She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron. swoons
La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats. A friend wrote a few lines from this in my yearbook.
Annabel Lee. Perfect in every way.
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson.
Anything by Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash.
I love poems!
The Raven’s Story
Swaggerin’ home in raven fashion, feelin’ rather bold and dashin’,
Thought I’d do some poet-bashin’; saw this light above a door -
A sign that E. A. Poe was porin’ o’er some problem bleak and borin’,
Like how to rhyme with Ulalume, or find a maiden named Lenore.
And when I heard the morbid nutter mutter, ‘Oh my lost Lenore!’
I tapped my beak against his door …
I recite this one at parties with much ensuing hilarity.
I go along the same lines as Marley23
The Wasteland
(Yes, maybe I’m crazy) 
Parts I and V always get me for some reason or another…
Mostly the Hyacinth girl section and the thunder speaking at the end.
Ulysses by Lord Tennyson
And The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Yes, this one–
At breakfast one day in Calcutta
Sat a man with a bit of a stutter
He said, “Pass the h-ham,
And the j-j-j-jam,
And the b-b-b-b-b-b-butter!”
The Congo Vachel Lindsay
The Cremation of Sam McGee Robert William Service
Lots of Kipling
*was indoctrinated in poetry by a fairly raucous group
Marley23, Prufrock will never become a cliche, IMO.
Lissla, Ulysses was one of JFK’s favorite poems and Mrs. Kennedy once memorized it for him as a gift.
This little love poem is just eight lines long, but I’ve loved it since I first found it at seventeen:
Wonderful, wonderful topic for a thread! Thank you so much, maddiesilver!
Yes, I have quite a few poems that reliably send chills all over me (even in summer with no air conditioning!)
Just off the top of my head:
W.H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone,” “First Things First,” “Leap before you look” and many others.
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets” and “The Waste Land.”
The “Pervigilium Veneris” or Vigil of Venus, which is actually quoted in the “Waste Land”: (quando fiam uti chelidon.) Usually when a line just floats up it’s in Latin, but if I hadn’t read the translation I would know a lot less of it. I have a copy I wrote out 20+ years ago and read it every spring. I don’t have a link for it, but it’s out there somewhere.
Last year I realized that lines from “Twink” by Robert Shure (Pub City Lights Books, ca. 1960) and from Roy Rogers, vol II (pub ca. 1971) also were echoing from my unconscious on a regular basis. I hadn’t had a copy of either in many years, but Alibris found both for me right away. The Roy Rogers is not actually a magazine, but a compilation of one-line poems collected by NY poet Bill Zavatsky.
Oh, and A.E. Housman, just about anything. Hair-raising.
Right on, this is a wonderful way to get acquainted!
Oldbat
Now that is a wonderful poem! I used to talk like that (only on occasion now). I copied it down to read to my mom.
Does this count as a poem?
Ogden Nash - “Candy is dandy, liquor is quicker.”
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Stephen Jesse Bernstein - More Noise Please
William S Burroughs - Did I Ever Tell You About…
Dulce Et Decorum Est or Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen.
Ever seen a field of daffodils in the springtime? Then how can you live without “I Wandered Lonley as a Cloud”:
*I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.*
Do you still get a thrill looking at a rainbow? The you must have “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold”:
*My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.*
I had a professor in college who told us, “Coleridge could make the supernatural seem familiar, bur Wordsworth could make the familiar seem supernatural!”
Most of my favorites (Anthem for Doomed Youth, Prufrock, Stopping by Woods) have already been mentioned. Fortunately, somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond isn’t on the list, so I’ll add that (it’s e.e. cummings, though the lack of caps should have given that away.)
Links, people! Please either link or quote the poem so I can read and appreciate properly.
Always nice to see old friends.
Of the new, I like the Berry poems, and the St. Vincent Millay Casual Way one.
Here’s an alternate Kipling, also about war.
All enemy divisions,
Recruits of every class,
And highly-screened positions,
For flame or poison gas;
The craft that we call modern,
The crimes that we call new,
John Bunyan had 'em typed and filed
In Sixteen Eighty-two.
Kipling uses some conventions that seem odd to my ear (the poem I’ve just quoted for instance is an homage to an admired writer, which he does a number of), but there’s often a nugget of something to like–“craft that we call modern, crimes that we call new.”
Someone always quotes Kubla Khan (His flashing eyes! His floating hair!), but I’ll give an alternative “supernatural” Coleridge to go with Labdad’s Wordsworth:
Such punishments, I said, were due,
To natures deepliest stained with sin,–
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
I wouldn’t call this poem a favorite because I don’t think I like the person voicing the poem, but it bugs me and I have always remembered it.
“The Parallax Mongraph for Rodin” by Norman Dubie. If you like poetry, do yourself a favor and seek out all the Dubie you can find. He’s still alive, even, and teaching at Arizona.
IMHO, there is no “better” expression of the horror of war than in poems. Books, music, movies, just don’t get to the point of what war means to an individual who lives it. I don’t think the same is true of love or birth–what is it about war that makes war poetry?