Has anybody an all time favourite poem?

I tried this before in the Lounge, and I didn't get 'checks' any replies, so is it alright if I open one here? I thought it would be cool to hear about people's taste in poems.

My favourite, all time poem, has to be- 'Morning Song' by Plath.

Anyone else got one?


Eimear

I don't have an all time favorite, but one I really love is The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound. It's said to be a translation of a poem by Chinese poet Li Po, but that it's such a free translation, it's a different poem all together.

I'm one of these people who can never pick a favourite anything, poetry being no exception. It depends on the way I'm feeling and what's going on in my life at the time I read it.

I keep a folder so that if I read something that resonates with me, I put it there to remember everything I've related to and hopefully not forget their existence! However, these are the favourites that remain constant:

'Death is nothing at all' - Henry Scott-Holland
'The Road Not Taken' - Robert Frost
'Because I could not stop for Death' - Emily Dickinson
'The Canonisation' - John Donne
'I Sit and Think' - J. R. R. Tolkien
'To Memory' - Mary Coleridge
'Romance del prisionero' - an old Spanish ballad

That's a fairly representative range of what I normally like. Poems with themes of death, memory or fate.

I'm going to stop typing now because I could go on forever about poetry - it's difficult to find people who also want to talk about it!

Im the same as saphire i always have too many favourites to pick but with poetry most of the ones i love are the ones we studied for gcse english lit. i think its mainly because once i studied the ideas behind them they held so much more meaning. i loved

Mother Any Distance - Simon Armitage
Before You Were Mine - Carol Anne Duffy
My Last Duchess - Robert Browning
On My First Sonne - Ben Johnson

and this wasnt one we studied but i remember reading it somewhere:

Sonnet 130- Shakespeare

i loved this one because the comparisons were so unconventional, escpecially for a sonnet, but it seemed to make it so much more sincere.

sofi wrote:i think its mainly because once i studied the ideas behind them they held so much more meaning.

That's the same for me. If I found something difficult to understand at first, then sometimes I just loved it even more when I started to see what it meant.

'My Last Duchess' is a great poem, but a bit disturbing! In mentioning Carol Ann Duffy, you reminded me of her poem 'Valentine', which I also love.

Ahh... 'My Last Duchess'

I remember our old English teacher trying to get us to like it, but we didn't. It's funny, though.

Oooh "Because I Could not Stop for Death" is also a favorite of mine. I have to give Dickinson some credit; her poem inspired one of my novels!

Frost is also a genius. I love his "Departmental", although anything by him is great.

All poetry equates the same feeling to me, so I really don't have a favorite. I just enjoy reading it and that's about it. If I had to pick SOMETHING though, it'd probably be something from the Spoon River Anthology...

I have two! "I Have Been One Acquainted With the Night" by Robert Frost and "Oda a la Alcachofa" by Pablo Neruda ^_^

I like Frost's poem for the sheer rhythm of it. I like it because it rhymes and the rhyme works and helps the poem, and it's a poem that really lends itself to being said over and over again.

yeah 'My Last Duchess' is pretty disturbing, but then most of the ones we studied were if you'd ever read 'Education For Leisure' and 'Havisham' by Carol Anne Duffy or 'Hitcher' by Simon Armitage, they are both quite sinister and disturbing, although i did like them a lot.

I did like 'Valentine' though, and the way she described an onion as 'a moon wrapped in brown paper'

Ooh. This is sort of like asking what my favorite song is... it changes every week. Right now, I'm partial to
All in green my love went riding by E.E. Cummings, even though I apparently interpret it completely differently than... uh, everybody. His i thank You God is another favorite (not 100% sure if that's the title, I think it is).

Carl Sandburg is probably my all-around favorite poet though. White Shoulders kills me every time I read it.

My all time favoritepoem would have to be "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.
I don't know what it is about that poem, but it just became my favorite after I read it.

"The Jazz Machine," by Richard Matheson.

It's more of a story-poem than anything else. You can't find it on the internet to my knowledge, so the only place to read it is in a short story compilation of Matheson's entitled "Button, Button". Yeah, I know he's the author of "I Am Legend", but the poem is pure genius.

-Kylan

Sad Steps by Larkin is lovely <3 I actually love his poetry despite having to study it.

I love love love 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou.
It's very powerful.