e.e. cummings - "nobody loses all the time. it always makes me smile.
i’m
serious.
go read it
if
you
don’t
believe me.
The greatest poem written in English in the 20th century is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. I know. Hyperbolic statement on my part. Still, it is amazing.
Not the most famous poem, not even Wordsworth’s best known sonnet, but I like it:
The world is too much with us
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Great title - goes a bit downhill after that, I fear.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
—Carl Sandburg