Well, I’m goofing off from the 15-page essay I have due on Monday (on gender, sexuality, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and the essays I have to mark for next Friday (for the Canadian Literature Survery course I’m TA-ing), so I figured I’d feel less guilty if I goofed off on something in my field
I can’t think opf a single famous poem the 15th Century produced. Nor can I think of anything between **Beowulf **and Piers Plowman (I can think of a few little-known examples, but nothing famous).
Eliot’s “Wasteland” mentioned twice, but my vote on him would go to “Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock”. His most famous line from a poem from neither of those, but the end of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Pretty much anything else I’d suggest has been mentioned. Including things I would have never thought of if my memory hadn’t been jogged.
I dunno… I’d say his most famous line from a poem would be “April is the cruelest month” from The Waste-Land. (Although my personal favorite is from Prufrock: I have measured out my life in coffee spoons)
Just remembered: Robert Burns, “Auld Lang Syne”. Definitely one of the most well-known poems in English.
Some of his lines from his other poems are often quoted as well: “For the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft’ agley” and “Tae see oorsels as ithers sees us” are two lines that come to mind.
Agreed. I memorized “The Hollow Men”, just for the sake of those last lines. I’d also agree that “Prufrock” is better known than “Wasteland”, in terms of the poem itself, at least, though more folks have probably heard of the latter title. The Practical Cats poems are also pretty well known, but that’s mostly due to the musical forms of them, so I’m not sure if they count.
I also note that nobody yet has nominated “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, by Robert Herrick (that’s the one that starts with “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”).
One should also mention Marlowe’s “The passionate shepherd to his love”, and Raleigh’s “The nymph’s reply to the shepherd”.
Also Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree).
And e. e. cummings’ “in Just-” (spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful)
I don’t think anybody has mentioned “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
I was going to say “Dulce et decorum est” for the 20th century, but somebody beat me to it.
How about the William Carlos Williams one about the plums?
I know somebody’s mentioned “The Second Coming”, but I’ll point out that when you can make jokes about it in general company (“Stop slouching!” - the mother of the beast) it’s obviously culturally internalized.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay’s [url=http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/Anthology/Millay/FirstFig.htm]“First Fig”** yet. Almost everyone knows the first line of this at least (“My candle burns at both end”), and many can probably recite the entire thing, even if they don’t know the poem’s title.
“The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (I always spell it Shallot, too. This is bad. Professors stop respecting you when start writing about Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Lady of Vaguely Onion-ish Vegetables.”)
