• I love the way Eliot puts the excerpt from Inferno as the epigraph at the beginning of the piece. Its seems to me to be heralding Prufocks descent into darkness. The classic hymn to avoiding procrastination. You can also see parts of The Waste Land starting to form.

@Bryn This thread has turned out great. My Favourite poem is (Spring and Fall) Goldengove by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I didn't understand the reference to Dante in T.S. Eliot's poem.

You are not alone there Bryn.

My three boys are TS Eliot, Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas

Like all kinds of poetry: Keats and Wallace Stevens tops for me. I also like Haiku, especially Ezra Pound's short haiku like poem:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

William Carlos Williams The Red Wheel Barrow is marvelous, complex and short.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Nymph’s Reply to the Shepard by Sir Walter Raleigh

Funeral Blues by William Auden

Love is More Thicker than Forget by e.e. cummings

I still haven't found the time/motivation in my life to read much poetry. Love Prufrock though, I'm not sure if I'll ever fully understand it but maybe thats the appeal. Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder is more at my comprehension level.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly
A winning wave, deserving note
In the tempestuous petticoat
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part

Now that I'm thinking more clearly, I'll say "The Dream Songs" by John Berryman.

Anything by Charles Bukowski. He brought poetry to the masses.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I do love your first selection, but think the second poem is lame; people that stupid shouldn't be skating on lake ice at night.

Listen to My Songs by JK McDougall by GypsyJackBoggleShow #np on #SoundCloud
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I still love Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

My favorite is “Casey at the bat.” Now that I think about it I’m wondering if that’s poetry!