Skip to content

Is Terence Davies the Patron Saint of MDK? Maybe! After Ann yammered about A Quiet Passion and then I went on a bit about The Long Day Closes, here we are again with another Davies addition to the MDK canon: Benediction.

Here’s the short take: It takes a look at poet Siegfried Sassoon’s just-post World War I life. He was already a successful writer by then, but his war experience awakened the dormant activist in him, and he lived the rest of his life with poetry and the politics of war (and love) twinned and twined together.

It’s the kind of movie I go absolutely nuts for, where the liveliest action consists of, oh, a guy in a tuxedo walking into a room and reciting a poem while standing in front of a fireplace. And … scene! But the most audacious scene in Benediction—and the one that made me fall hard for the movie—asks the viewer to watch a character read a letter for several minutes … and he reads the letter silently! Then we watch Sassoon watch him read the letter. Again, silently! A friend of mine saw this scene and called it “the boldest scene of 2021” and I have to agree in some ways—it takes some nerve for a director to try and pull it off.

So if that’s not your cup of tea (and look: this thing literally has a lot of cups of tea in it. It might as well be sponsored by Twinings), you’re forgiven.

Your loss, though! Benediction may be low-key, but it’s also high-stakes. Poetry and war are heady, heavy subjects and the movie takes on the former directly and the latter obliquely (without giving things away, Sassoon engages in several different types of it). But it’s not all doom and gloom and crisply-intoned couplets. It’s perfectly cast with Jack Lowden as Sassoon, but Jeremy Irvine—as Ivor Novello—stops just this side of camp and almost walks off with the movie.

It might just get you to revisit the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon by sending you to your dusty old boxed-up college literature anthology. If it does that, well … that’s something.

Benediction is streaming on Hulu and the usual sorts of places like Amazon, Apple+, Vudu, Blibbity Blab and Whatnot.

A Giveaway

The prize? Three MDK Field Guides to fill out (or start!) your collection. You choose! See them all here on our Make Your Own Field Guide Bundle page.

How to enter?

Two steps:

Step 1: Sign up for MDK emails, right here. If you’re already signed up, you’re all set. We have a new option for texting, so when you sign up for those, you’ll get a coupon code good for 10% off your next MDK order.

Step 2: Leave a beloved poet’s name or a Poetry Foundation link to a favorite poem in a comment below.

Deadline for entries: Sunday, April 2, 11:59 PM Central time. We’ll draw a random winner from the entries. Winner will be notified by email.

Subscribe Now and Save All Year
A year of fun is yours when you subscribe to our Field Guides for 2023. Three brand-new little books star superb designers. Field Guide subscribers save an amazing 10% off every single Shop purchase. All year long! Subscribe now and we’ll send Field Guide No. 23: Glow to you right away.

About The Author

DG Strong took up knitting in 2014. He lives in Nashville with his sister, her rat terrier and a hound dog named Opal. He has a blog of drawings and faintly ridiculous rambling called The Psychopedia—there are worse ways to spend your afternoon.

638 Comments

  • Beloved poet: Denise Levertov

    • Robert Frost…

    • W.B. Yeats

      • Living in Nebraska, I am constantly quoting to myself Christina Rossi’s poem, “Who Has Seen The Wind” to myself. Luckily it’s on the Poetry Foundation website. It may be one of her children’s poems, but oh so appropriate for the Midwest!

      • I am all things Mary Oliver and a favorite is “I worried” which is not on Poetry Foundation unfortunately.

    • W.B. Yeats. I

      • Wisława Szymborska

      • Wendell Berry

      • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56159/this-is-just-to-say
        OR
        Sunday Morning – Wallace Stevens

      • Shel Silverstein – for the joy he brings children.

        • Edgar Allen Poe

      • Robert Frost!

        • Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

        • Kristin Zimet

        • Marianne Peele. I met her in Florida a couple of years ago. Her poetry is thoughtful and rich.

  • ❤️Mary Oliver

    • Robert Frost

    • Robert Frost

    • Gerard Manley Hopkins

    • Gillian Welch

  • well, I’ll go w/ one most likely not chosen: Edgar Allan Poe

    oh how I’d love to win to get to select 3 Field Guides!

    • Love Poe!

    • A.A. Milne

  • “Twinned and twined”. Love that.
    I’ll go with a new fav for poet, Amanda Gorman.

    • Brilliant poem.

  • Mary Oliver

    • The Layers-Stanley Kuntiz

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

    I memorized this poem in preparation for reciting it at the Memorial Day celebration when I was a senior in high school. It rained and the celebration was cancelled, but I’ve still got the poem memorized, 22 years later. My dad had to memorize Rudyard Kipling’s “If” when he was in elementary school. He loved it, and could recite it upon request for all the rest of his life. I’ve got a copy printed out in my office in his memory.

    • One of my all-time favorites as well.

    • Adrienne Rich

    • ❤️

      • Robert Frost and E.E.Cummings are my favorites

        • Love them both!

  • Ruth Zardo

    • Yes, Ruth Zardo! She’s fictional but that’s okay. Awesome series.

    • Yes! Ruth Zardo, for sure!

    • Haha, she is FINE!

    • Haha!

    • Many of Ruth Zardo’s poems are written by the amazing Margaret Atwood.

      • Loving the joys of Gamache!

      • Oh! What fun to know!

    • Maya Angelou

    • Ha! Yes!

  • W. H. Auden

  • I like Sylvia Plath, among other poets.

  • Robert Frost

  • Dylan Thomas

    • So happy to see a post by DG! Makes my day!

  • In elementary school we had to memorize The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes….sixty years later I still remember it.

    • Maya Angelou and William Blake

  • Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach:

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach

  • Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Hafiz, Rumi, Robert Frost…

    • Pablo Neruda was a sock loving ode writer that I too!

      • Rumi and Mary Oliver have both been wise companions throughout my life…

  • Love Emily Dickinson ❤️

  • Edgar Guest, known as the People’s Poet.

  • Robert Frost. Oldie and a goodie.

    • Robert Graves, another war poet.

    • My grandmother had Robert Frost as an English teacher in high school!

    • Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening is my favorite by Frost. Last line always makes me think of knitting….miles to go before I sleep….

      • So true! And that’s when I set up my unknitting for the next day!

  • Gerard Manley Hopkins

  • Robert Frost

  • Krista Franklin
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/krista-franklin

  • Sounds like my kind of movie!

    • Frost!

  • Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy | Poetry Foundation
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec

  • Thank you DG! I am sifting through Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Marge Pierce, Audre Lorde trying to find a poem I once loved and hadn’t thought of in a while. Haven’t found that poem, but here’s a good one. It even mentions knitting.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47399/for-the-young-who-want-to

  • Mary Oliver

  • James Whitcomb Riley—fun poems to read aloud to children.
    Read them with enhanced dialect.

  • Grover

  • “When Great Trees Fall” https://poems.com/poem/when-great-trees-fall/

  • Christna Rossetti
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50289/echo-56d22d3f77136

  • I found the poem I was looking for — my husband gave it to me framed for my graduation from medical school. It’s Anne Sexton’s Doctors.
    https://allpoetry.com/poem/8505205-Doctors-by-Anne-Sexton

  • I love John Keats. I memorized Ode to a Nightingale in the eighth grade.

  • Edgar Allen Poe

  • Mary Oliver

  • Rumi

  • Gwendolyn Brooks. She went to school with my unclle in Chicaggo innthe 30’s.

    • e e cummings

  • One of my most beloved poets, Joy Harjo, is the first Native American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, and only the second poet to serve three terms. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joy-harjo

    • As a child I memorized The Duel by Eugene Field, about the gingham dog and the calico cat.

  • Emily Dickinson but I must say the poem by William Wordsworth that Diane left in the comments on Max Daniels latest self care post was beautiful.

  • Emily Dickinson ❤️

  • Maya Angelou

  • Jim Harrison is a very beloved poet!

  • You must read the work of Nikita Gill!

  • Shauna Haugan is one of my favorite poets. Her Memories of My Father always brings tears to my eyes.

  • When bear no longer
    scatter salmon in the woods
    the forest suffers

  • The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is probably my all-time favorite.

    • Richard Wilbur

    • Robert Frost

  • I first heard this poem in an episode of Ballykissangel (which might be something to look into for a Knit to This column). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/77003/aedh-wishes-for-the-cloths-of-heaven

  • Nature’s first green is gold,
    Her hardest hue to hold.
    Her early leaf’s a flower;
    But only so an hour.
    Then leaf subsides to leaf.
    So Eden sank to grief,
    So dawn goes down to day.
    Nothing gold can stay.

    Robert Frost

    • This is one of my favorites. I love Robert Frost.

  • Moira Egan, a talented poet and beautiful human. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/moira-egan

  • Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry

  • Amanda Gorman!

  • Robert Frost…a true New Englander.

    • Irene Latham , past poet laureate of Alabama; lovely words for children as well as adults.

  • Shel Silverstein, favorite poem is Ations.

  • Favorite poet is Mary Oliver…my favorite poem is “Wild Geese”.

  • Amanda Gorman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman

  • I always liked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. My favorite is The Children’s Hour

  • Shakespeare

  • Robert Frost. “The Road Not Taken,” first published in 1915 in Atlantic Monthly, remains one of the most memorable poems of all time to me.

    D.G., I can’t begin to tell you how happy seeing you back has made me this morning. Always a wonderful way to start the day.

  • I am not much of a poetry fan. But I do love Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare, when I can figure out what he’s saying. I’ve seen a few Shakespeare plays and thoroughly enjoyed them. Sadly I never had classes about poetry in college.

    • This sharing of favourites is a pretty good, comprehensive list of well-loved poems. It’s never too late to start your own study!

  • Emily Dickenson

  • Robert Frost

  • Auden, Yeats, Thomas Hardy

  • Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Rumi, Collins

  • Hope is the thing with feathers
    That perches in the soul
    And sings the song without the words
    And never stops at all
    Emily Dickinson

    • Thanks—I’d forgotten this one.

  • I’m a fan of Billy Collins. Here’s a sample called The Lanyard:
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50975/the-lanyard

  • EmilyDickinson

  • Pablo Neruda’s Ode to My Socks. Oddly, Poetry Foundation does not have it but here is a link: https://poets.org/poem/ode-my-socks

    • Brilliant!

    • And it’s not just an ode to socks but an ode to HAND-KNITTED socks!

      • Yes, I print it out sometimes to enclose with socks when I make them for other people.

  • When I was younger, it was none but Rupert Brooke. Now Ted Kooser is my guy.

  • Seamus Heaney….Along the Flaggy Shore……takes me back to Ireland in my minds eye, every time I read it or think about it. Memory and words, completely intertwined.

    • Thanks for sharing this one.

  • Robert Bly: For My Son Noah, 10 Years Old.

  • TS Eliot

  • “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Barry. Unfortunately, it’s not on the Poetry Foundation’s site. You can find it here:
    https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/

    • Mary, that’s my favorite too! I laminated a copy and carry it in my purse so I can be reminded of how to find peace in this world.

      • Greet idea.

  • Another vote for Mary Oliver here!

  • David Whyte, thanks for asking. And thanks for the recommendation of a movie!

  • Emily Dickinson. I received a little book of her poetry from my Grandma when I was young and I still have it.

  • I have been reading Shel Silverstein with my kids lately.

  • Victoria Erickson is contemporary poet I’ve recently discovered – “Instant illumination rarely happens. Your tiny revelations will seep in stitch by stitch. Rest the reaching”.

  • so many good ones. can’t choose just one….! Oliver, Frost

  • amanda gorman of course

  • Too many poets and poems to choose from! I will go with Robert Louis Stevenson as one of my favorite poets.

  • Shakespeare

  • Philip Larkin captures a lot of how I feel and think.

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Anything Maya Angelou, or Jenny Joseph’s “Warning”.

  • Amanda Gorman

  • Robert Frost

  • Phyllis McGinley — so readable, so accurate!

  • For more Sassoon, I recommend his two autobiographical volumes, and also Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy – the first book has Sassoon as a main character. All excellent books!
    Favorite poet? It depends on my mood, but Yeats is high on the list. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…”

  • John Ashberry, John Ashberry, John Ashberry.

    I didn’t do a Knit to This about them, but all of you poetry lovers should look up that series of Everyman Pocket Poet books. At this point there are over a hundred of them and they just keep coming. Support poetry by buying them new! But my secret hot tip is that they show up at used bookstores for mere pennies on the dollar all the time because I think they’re very very gifty and people don’t always get the gifting right. “Oh, a volume of Gerald Manley Hopkins for my high school graduation? NO THANKS, AUNT FANNY.”

    https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PTO/everymans-library-pocket-poets-series

    • Thank you DJ. I clicked the link to find that the latest in the series is Uyghur Poetry. I learned something in an overwhelming way.

  • My favorite poet is my daughter, Alison Jordan. She has only been published in Maryland Bards.

  • James Kavanaugh’s collection, There are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves”.

  • My sister in both angst-in and nature loving: Emily Dickinson

  • My husband is my favorite pier, with Emily D. a close second. He started writing haiku as short emails to me early in our relationship while he was at sea on research cruises. 35 years later, he still is writing. ❤️
    https://haikupresence.org/recent/issue-73/

  • Walt whitman

  • Anything by Wendell Berry, please!

  • Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
    How appropriate at the moment is that church was cancelled this morning because we have a snow alert. We just got dump on on Friday and supposed to snow all next week. Welcome to NB Canada

  • I’m a huge Shakespeare fan. I also love Robert Burns. I’m not much on poetry but these two I love.

  • Cargoes. John Masefield.

  • It’s been so lovely this morning, wandering through all these poems and memories. Thanks DG for this!

  • Nikki Giovanni is my first favorite to come to mind. She taught me that I might not be able to see out my dirty windows, but then you also can’t see in my house, and that a bite of fudge tastes like love.

  • Mary Oliver

  • Ruth Zardo from the Gamache mysteries

  • So many poets! But — Denise Levertov, “A Tree Telling of Orpheus.”

  • Canadian Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”
    https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/wayman/poem5.htm

  • Robert Frost

  • e e cummings, for giving thoughts shape.
    Lawrence Ferlinghetti for “Christ Climbed Down.”
    Mary Oliver, because my life is better when I see the world through her eyes.

  • What a beautiful way to start Sunday— reading and thinking about great poetry. A favorite of mine is Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”. And now, to re-examine the familiar names mentioned here, and to explore the new suggestions.

  • Omar Khayyám:

    A BOOK of Verses underneath the Bough,
    A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
    Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
    O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  • A poem that every knitter needs to read: Pablo Neruda, An Ode to My Socks https://poets.org/poem/ode-my-socks

  • The Road Not Taken -Robert Frost.

  • Hands down, Billy Collins!!!

    • Marlene: He was my close second. . . virtually any of his!

  • Oh I love our home town poet: Longfellow.

  • James Whitcomb Riley- love his poetry! DG, yay!!! Great to have you back. I love your writing- cracks me right up. Xoxox

  • DG, wherefore are thou? So good to see you back here. Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed the endearing poems by Edgar A. Guest.

  • Mary Oliver

  • Hands down, Billy Collins! I adore him. I have several favorites (actually more than several) from him. Here’s one of them. https://upittpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/9780822938934exr.pdf

    • Oh! This is wonderful.

  • I, also, loved The Highwayman since school. I believe it fostered my youthful love of tragic romance.

  • Robert Frost

  • There is so much profound poetry and remarkable poets. But I’m in a silly mood, so I give you this for your Sunday.

    The Cow, by Ogden Nash

    The cow is of the bovine ilk;
    One end is moo, the other, milk.

    • “The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery” is one of my all-time favorites!

  • Beloved poet: Maya Angelou

  • Langston Hughes, e e cummings & Robert Frost

  • I will always love Emily Dickenson.

  • Ted Kooser.

  • Robert Frost

  • Sounds like a great movie but thanks for the warning as I can easily see my husband exclaiming loudly at the long silent scenes! So hard to pick a favourite poem or poet. One of my favourite’s is Surfaces by F.R. Scott with these lines:
    Come, flaunt the brief prerogative of life,
    Dip your small civilized foot in this cold water
    And ripple, for a moment, the smooth surface of time.

  • Lord Byron.

  • Without a doubt, Lucille Clifton https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bh-Ipj4AKfc

  • Edna St Vincent Millay

  • e. e. cummings

    • scratch that answer after doing a quick bit of reading about e.e.

  • Walt Whitman, for his poetry first and foremost, and his nursing Civil War soldiers second.
    (I saw Benediction on a plane 2 weeks ago. Must watch again soon because the sound and visual quality were so dismal. And just because!)

  • Wait…. Ivor Novello as in Gosford Park??! I’m sold!

    • I was so excited I forgot to put my fav poet! Poe….

  • Mary Ruefle.

  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  • Amanda Gorman

  • Ellen Sazzman

  • I heard this poem read at a college graduation ceremony. I now enclose a copy in a card whenever someone I know graduates.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47993/famous

  • Brian Bilston, books only available in Britain, unfortunately

  • I put here two poems, the one that my father loves so much that he inspired me to memorize it just for the joy of feeling close to him when
    I went cross-country to college:
    my father moved through dooms of love/ e.e. cummings

    And the second, a poem that brought me back from the brink of an absolute crisis of faith and mental heath: The Convert, by G.K. Chesterton.

  • Dolly Parton. But also Emily Dickinson.

  • Raymond Carver

  • My mother passed away 7 years ago today at the age of 99. She could recite poetry and she could write it. And did!

    MAMMOTH PUZZLES
    by Lilla Barnes (written in Alaska, 1977)

    I wonder as I wander on the tundra
    What is resting in the permafrost below.
    Are there frozen footprints lying there forever,
    Made by mouse and wooly mammoth long ago?

    Did a furry fuzzy fellow on his tippies
    Make his tiny trackies toward some little weeds,
    To munch his yummie mouse little luncheon
    With his teeny tushes crunching little seeds?

    Was a great galumphing thumphing giant creature
    Poking pond’rously along his wandering way?
    A wondrous woozy walloping wooly mammoth
    Looking forward to a sunny happy day?

    Did the mouse feel the ground beneath him tremble?
    Did he lift his head and see an open cave,
    Which was really wooly mammoth’s gaping nostrils
    But appeared to be a place a mouse to save?

    (Little mouse voice:)
    “Is that a dark, mysterious cave ‘n’ could it be that it’s a haven
    For a frightened tiny mousie just like me?
    It looks so safe inside, and I need a place to hide –
    I’ll run Inside the cavern, and I’ll see!”

    (Big mammoth voice:)
    “AS I SNIFF ALONG AND SMELL THE
    PRETTY FLOWERS,
    NOW AND THEN I’LL PICK AND EAT A YUMMY FEW.
    LONG TRUNK FEELS ALONG THE GROUND,
    BIG EARS HEAR A SQUEAKY SOUND,
    BUT EYES DON’T NOTICE ANYTHING THAT’S NEW;
    YET SOMETHING TICKLES IN MY NOSE, MUST BE POLLEN, I SUPPOSE, AS I INHALE, ah-ahhh-AHAA-AH-CHOOO!”

    Was there then a great reaction,
    More than sneezing satisfaction?
    Did mouse shoot out and beast sit down
    With action that compressed the ground?
    Newtonian action at its best,
    One headed east, the other west?

    Did tracks reverse on that terrain,
    Just as the snow began to rain?
    Did Earth itself make half a turn
    And arctic air ice palm and fern?
    Did temperature in sudden fall
    Freeze mouse and mammoth, flowers and all?

    Oh, I wonder as I wander on the tundra
    What is sleeping in the permafrost below –
    And I think I hear a squeaking and a bellow,
    Faint and ghostly sounds that echoed long ago!
    *****

    And then she wrote a coda based on the archeological discovery in Central Texas, where (at the age of 77) she got to help dig. She performed this poem and the coda when they celebrated the find.

    Milam County, Texas, 1993:
    Now our classic saga varies very little on the prairies,
    Except there is no permafrost below;
    And the mammoth that is truly lying here is not so wooly,
    Didn’t need fur on his hide to turn the snow.
    But a teeny tiny mouse could mistake him for a house,
    Little tracks would mark its footsteps in the clay.
    And the great bones underground could have made a thunder sound
    When Mammuthus stomped and tromped across the way.

    And now from far and near, we have come with great good cheer,
    To pick and probe and dig, for something here is VERY big –
    With friends we never knew before today
    We reveal Imperial’s bones lying on caliche stones
    So we celebrate the finds and stretch our finite minds
    In a PA-LE-ON-TO-LOG-I-CAL fun way!

    • Thank you for sharing these! What wonderful poems! She must have had a marvelous sense of humor

      • Thanks Jennifer. She had a marvelous sense of humor! And she loved a good pun!

  • W. H. Auden

  • Mary Oliver

  • Carl Sandburg

  • An unusual entry I’m guessing, but as a teacher I’ve loved sean o’huigan for many years. It’s kids poetry of the most ridiculous kind, but kids love it, and can learn early that poetry can be fun. I still carry “Monsters He Mumbled” and “Scary Poems for Rotten Kids” in my subbing bag.

  • I am not a fan of poetry but, Amanda Gorman just sings!

  • Charif Shanahan

  • Robert Frost

  • Frost

  • My poet if Mary Oliver.

  • This has been on my list.

    Bonus: in NYC the Jewish Museum has an exhibit on the Sassoon family.
    https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-sassoons

    ‘Dulce et decorum est’

    • Oops. Keats was my first poet love.

      But I mentioned Wilfred Owen above, appropriate given the post. It’s a powerful poem.
      https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

      And Welcome Back DG! You were missed.

      Recommendation: the actor Samuel West and friends did a project over lockdown called ‘Pandemic Poems’ on SoundCloud. Wonderful readings of all sorts of poems.

  • a Dutch poem and poet: Stadgenoot by Jan G. Elburg
    https://neerlandistiek.nl/2020/01/gedicht-jan-g-elburg-•-stadgenoot/
    and i still have a soft spot for the Odyssey by Homer

  • Dare I say it? I was never much for poetry. Although we did read the Shel Silverstein books to my daughter when she was young. Does that count?

  • Mary Oliver

  • William Wordsworth

  • Pablo Neruda because of the fresh produce!

  • One of the few poems that I have memorized is Goethe”s “Über allen Gipfeln” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong) from a high school German class very many years ago and I have no idea why I can still recite it in German 50+ years later.

  • Shakespeare for one. I tend to prefer the old poets.

  • Since we’re talking about Siegfried Sassoon, my favorite poet is Wilfred Owen.

    • Owen looms mightily in Benediction.

      • Thank you for your movie recommendation. I watched it today, and loved it!
        Wilfred Owen and Sassoon have been among my favorites since I read the Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell.

      • There’s another excellent movie, Regeneration, about Sassoon and Owen made by Gillies Mackinnon in the late 90s from the Barker books. I haven’t seen Benediction, so thanks for the suggestion.

  • Carl Sandberg “little cat feet”

  • Walt Whitman

  • W. H. Auden

  • Ruth Zardo from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. She’s not a real person but she’s FINE.

    • She is a real person, in that her poems are from Canadian poets, often Margaret Atwood, that Louise Penny uses by permission.

  • Poetry to me is like favorite foods. Sometime I want savory, sometime sweet. I don’t compare eggs Benedict to challah French toast. Both are great for breakfast, just different. If I must state, I would probably list my father, George Everett Koontz (May his memory be a blessing) but I cry every single time I read one of his poems. Every time.

  • Rumi

  • Nate Marshall!

  • Fun fact for DG: I was browsing in Wikipedia today to learn more about Sassoon and found out that he married in 1933 and had a child. He and his wife separated in 1945 and she went to live in Lochbuie, Mull – where “I Know Where I’m Going” also was filmed in 1945.
    In more sheepy news, she and her son had a sheep farm there. No word on what kind of sheep they raised but other sources say presently Mull hosts Swaledale, Scottish black-faced, Hebridean, Shetland, and Zwartbles.

  • Mary Oliver

  • Many worthies, but I’ll say Robert Frost.

  • Wendell Berry’s Our Real Work. For some reason it’s not on the Poetry Foundation website but here is a link to it: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2017/12/29/our-real-work-by-wendell-berry/

    Also TS Eliot

  • Robert Frost and Alfred Noyes

  • e.e.cummings

  • Amanda Gorman

  • right now enthralled with barbara kingsolver poetry.

  • Joy Harjo

  • William Blake. A poisoned tree

  • Walt Whitman. And Ruth Zardo!

  • Dorothy Parker

  • I am too literal for most poetry, so I miss out on a lot, but I’ve loved this poem since 1976
    “The Fairies”
    Written by William Allingham

  • Shel Silverstein

  • Maya Angelou

  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by Wordsworth.

  • Many beloved poets and poems, but I currently recite “Song for a Daughter”, by Ursula Le Guin to myself on my morning walks.

  • Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass” has always been my favorite.

  • Marvell, Jarrell, Yeats, Keats, Oliver, Harjo, Cashion …

  • William Wordsworth

  • Benediction is on my list – I’m not going to look for the poetry at the moment, but I may go up and dig out his Sherston Trilogy. So good.

  • 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. Absolutely beautiful.

  • One of the saddest poems ever written https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40518/detroit-tomorrow

  • I adore Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here’s a good one. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur

  • Shel Silverstein
    Mrs McTwitter the Babysitter thought
    The sitter should
    Sit upon the baby

  • Bob Dylan, the poet of a generation

  • One of my favorite poets is Billy Collins. I’ve always liked this one: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry

  • Robert Browning
    Grow old with me…

  • Robert Browning. ‘Home Thoughts, From Abroad’ (“Oh to be in England now that April’s there …”)
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43758/home-thoughts-from-abroad

  • # 1 Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses.
    # 2 Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening

  • Alfred Lord Tennyson

  • I send appropriate poems to my grandsons in their cards. Thanks to all here for a treasure trove of names I did not know. Longfellow is an old favorite, Paul Revere’s Ride and Hiawatha favorites.

    • For their birthday!

  • Poet: Marge Piercy

  • Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas comes to mind. I am not familiar with poetry but this one speaks to me now in my time of life. (Interesting how others’ comments and quotes help me realize I am more familiar with poetry than I thought.)

  • Thank you for the reminder about this film! I have recently discovered Nate Marshall and would recommenf Finna: Poems.

  • St. Vincent Millay- 1st Fig or Next fig- any fig at all!

  • Just one … that’s a tough one! I love the writing of our current US Poet Laureate, Ada Limòn. I’ve added a link to her poem, “How to Triumph Like a Girt”

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149814/how-to-triumph-like-a-girl

  • My brother, Ray Heinrich

  • High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee Jr., always chokes me up.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7

  • The preface to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman that starts “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

  • Mary Oliver!!

  • Robert Frost

  • Mark Attwood is my new favorite poet!!!!!

  • You have been missed, welcome back

  • Poet, Songwriter, singer, Leonard Cohen

  • So many favorites have been mentioned. Favorites change from hour to hour, mood to mood but I always love T. S. Elliot and Prufrock.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

  • Poet: Mark vanDoren

    • Dorothy Parker!

  • Ruth Zardo and her alter-ego.

  • Shel Silverstein

  • Robert Frost!

  • Richard Wilbur’s A Late Aubade. I read it in high school (back in the 1900s) and still remember it today.

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” (The Road Not Taken)

  • Hilda Doolittle, Billy Collins, Robert Browning

  • Mary Oliver. How to pick one. I can’t. Or, perhaps Robert Frost.

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Rita Dove

  • Shel Silverstein

  • I was a neighbor to a poet once, so she’s my favorite: Jane Vincent Taylor.

  • Kate Daniels, Gregory Orr

  • Every year on the Vernal Equinox my husband reads from Hafez for guidance on the year ahead. The wisdom is always relatable despite being written 700 years ago.

  • A E Housman esp A Shropshire Lad. An example: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52706/when-i-was-one-and-twenty-56d2316642304

  • Adrienne Rich

  • The Roman poet Catullus.

  • Galway Kinnell but Sassoon is right up there for me.

  • Robert Frost

  • How lovely to ask that question! I just ended a wonderful school-based book study group by sharing this poem by Marge Piercy: “To Be Of Use.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use

  • My great aunt Mary Chandleer Poole. She was the first person to make poetry speak for me.

  • For me it has to be Shel Silverstein..just sayin’

  • Langston Hughes.

  • Very hard to pick. Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe or Shel Silverstein

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42987/patterns

  • ee cummings

    love the words and their arrangements

  • William Butler Yeats-To a child dancing upon the shore.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=12617

  • Rita Dove-Canary
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43359/canary

  • My favorite poets are Robert Frost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  • Diane di Prima, Ted Kooser, Sam Hamill…
    Looking up Siegfried Sassoon tuit de suite!

  • Tomas Transtromer. Especially “Snow Is Falling”.

  • w. h. auden

  • Natalie Scenters-Zapico – amazing!

  • Joy Harjo, U.S. poet laureate 2019

  • Lewis Carroll

  • John Donne …ask not for whom the bell tolls…

  • Amanda Gorman is amazing

  • EE Cummings, with Ruth Zardo a close second.

  • Paul Laurence Dunbar

  • Emily Dickinson

  • How can I pick just one. So I will defer to my favorite poets of song Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello. And throw in Emily Dickinson David Whyte Mary Oliver and e.e. cummings. Huzzah!

  • I often come back to Wendell Pierce.

  • I adore Ogden Nash. And The Day Is Done by Longfellow.

  • Dylan Thomas – his poem called Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night always makes me cry, especially the last line…

  • David Bowie 🙂

  • Robert Frost ❤️

  • Sylvia Plath

  • WB Ueats

  • Mary Oliver

  • Walt Whitman

  • Shel Silverstein https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55343/dirty-face

  • John O’Donohue, my YOGA teacher is from Ireland and reads from his work every class with her beautiful accent

  • Favourite poem?!?!? I thought your “Favourite Yarn” question was impossible enough! Lol! “Favourite poem” is worse than “favourite child” or “favourite flavour” or “favourite moment memory”! For me, poetry changes with the weather, with the climate (as in social/political), with the place, and with the seasons. Lately though, I am heavily into the women, the poetesses, who see the anger, the angst, the hatred and brutality around us all and choose to turn to the beautiful, kind and gentle, but do so with a power and strength that carries me through the rough seas with them. I turn to Mary Oliver so often for quiet wisdom of the forgotten and overlooked. I celebrate Amanda Gorman For the sacred and spiritual wisdom of an old soul in youth. But I link today to Maya Angleou, because I’ve had a difficult week personally, and find in the news more difficulty brewing for so so many… Still I Rise
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

  • I have to go back to the books that started my love of poetry, “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We Are Seven” by A.A. Milne. Sometimes, for show and tell at primary school, I would take one of these books and read a couple of poems.

  • Shel Silverstein.

  • I am going to go a bit off the reservation here, and say that my favorite poet is Bob Dylan. He wrote poems that became songs. I came of age in the 1960’s, and his words always drove right into the middle of my heart. Think of “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend….,” and “Hard Rain” for example.

  • Favorite poet: Maya Angelou

  • I am particularly drawn to Catherine Barnett – her poems on grief are especially poignant.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/catherine-barnett

  • The first poetry anthology I read as a child. “Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle”. Still one of my faves.

  • I’ve tried to come up with one favorite poet or poem but there are just so many. But in reading the comments, with so many great poets mentioned, I didn’t see two of my favorites: Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney.

  • What a fun prompt! I look forward to reading through everyone’s comments. I will share “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms

  • Beloved poets (that few other people will probably mention): Gerard Manley Hopkins and Philip Larkin.

  • Robert Frost

  • James Whitcomb Riley!!!

  • Robert Frost

  • Ron Smith

  • Wendell Berry The Peace of Wild Things https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2011/10/pickin-on-wendell-berry

  • e.e. cummings.

  • Billy Collins, Andrew Marvell Edmund Spenser and John Donne! Don’t ask me to refine that further.

  • Voices in the Air, Katherine Mansfield

  • I can’t resist…Emily Dickinson!

  • From a young age: Ogden Nash!

  • Gwendolyn Brooks

  • Greg Keith

  • Beloved Poet: A.A. Milne

  • Theodore Roethke

  • e.e. cummings

    I remember the very first time I saw his work in print – the joy! the utter rebelliousness of it! I couldn’t find that first poem, r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-g-r [grasshopper] on the Poetry Foundation site…I did find it at https://poets.org/poem/r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-g-r.

  • Maya Angelou’s “The Human Family” has long rung in my ears as one of the most poignant poems of our times. “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” Here is the link to the full text…https://allpoetry.com/Human-Family

  • I live 4 miles from the Robert Frost house so I have to choose Robert Frost.

  • Robert Frost

  • Robert Service; in particular, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”

  • Pablo Neruda

  • Trees by Joyce Kilmer
    And I haven’t met a tree I didn’t like yet!

  • Thanks to everyone who posted. I’m not a big poetry person, but found a new favorite – Billy Collins

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=41392

  • From high school English, but it stayed with me. For Whom the Bell Tolls by John Donne

  • I couldn’t manage a link but I adore Robert Frost’s poem “Birches”

  • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, from Spain

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

    Written by Sassoons friend Wilfred Owens. The two met here in Edinburgh while convalescing towards the end of the war.

  • Amanda Gorman!

  • Marge Piercy

  • The first poet I thought of is Dylan Thomas, who my husband loves.
    Then I thought of W.S. Merwin, who I enjoy.
    But the only poems I can remember are by Alfred Lord Tennyson, so I think he wins for me.

  • Rilke. Deep, deep, deep.

  • Mary Oliver – Dog Songs

  • If you’d like to read the work of a brilliant contemporary poet who is also a fierce knitter, seek out Tina Kelley. For a specific famous poem, “Axe Handles” by Gary Snyder is kind of a dude version of a knitting poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57150/axe-handles

    • That poem is amazing and I really enjoyed it. Thank you for the link. So fitting as a parent and a teacher.

  • Edgar Allen Poe has been one of my favorites.

  • Robert Frost and Walt Whitman are two I enjoy!

  • My neighbor wrote a book of poems, That’s What I Thought. His name is Jim Seales and he was the lead Guitarist for the band, Shenandoah.

  • Mary Oliver all the way.

  • Ruth Bell Graham

  • Love so many, but Mary Oliver is the one I turn to most often!

  • Mary Oliver

  • Lewis Carroll! Can you really beat “Jabberwocky”?

  • Beloved poet: Langston Hughes

  • Robert Frost

  • Robert Frost

  • Robert Frost

  • Robert Frost

  • Phyllis Wheatley, the first African-American poet: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/143633/a-hymn-to-the-evening

  • Billy Collins.

  • Rumi

  • Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

  • Mary Oliver

  • Leonard Cohen forever!

  • Judith Viorst whose lines are worked into our family’s lexicon

  • Maya Angelou ❤️

  • Amanda Gorman really caught my ear recently.

  • Robert Frost’s The Pasture, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44270/the-pasture, is so close to my heart.

  • Robert Burns. I have the book of his poems that my great grandfather brought with him when he emigrated from Scotland so many years ago. Precious to me!

  • Charles Beaudelaire

  • Nicholas Christopher. His book of poems Five Degrees is brilliant.

  • Mary Oliver The Summer Day

  • Lynn Liftshin

  • e e cummings

  • TS Eliot

  • John Keats

  • Amanda Gorman

  • I love Billy Collins!

  • I have always loved the works of WH Auden

  • Pablo Neruda

  • Edna St. Vincent Millay

  • Anya Silver, any poem really. This one is good: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55347/leaving-the-hospital

  • Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral lovely in any language

  • I teach my young students this stanza from a Rosemary Girardi poem.
    Do you love me, or do you not?
    You told me once, but I forgot.
    So tell me now, and tell me true
    So I can tell you that I love you.

  • Shel Silverstein

  • Omar Khayyam is my favorite! Followed by Anna Ahmatova and Sergey Yesenin. Thanks for another great newsletter and giveaway! 🙂

  • Thanks for this nudge to read some poetry! Mary Oliver, Maya Angelo, Nikki Giovanni…

  • I love Robert Frost, but also Poe.

  • Dr. Seuss!

  • E E Cummings

  • Wendell Berry

  • Hard to choose just one poet but as a child I was obsessed with the book “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  • Mary Oliver

  • Robert Frost will forever be my favorite, I have a homegrown anthology favorite developed over 50+ years of indiscriminate poetry reading. I remember Sassoon and the war poets of WWI from college days, and am currently enjoying Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate 2001-2003.

  • One favorite poet of mine is Christine De Luca, Shetland poet.

  • Billy-Ray Belcourt

  • Shel Silverstein

  • Sylvia Plath!

  • When I was 9 or so my dad introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe. It was a great thing to share. Dad died when I was 10. Poe will always hold a special spot.

  • Rumi

  • Robert Frost has been a favorite poet of mine for more years than I can count.

  • Robert Frost

  • W.H. Auden — thanks for the giveaway!

  • I live in Amherst, MA home of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Their namesakes and influence are all around me. I live in a poem!

  • Mary Oliver is one of my favorites!

  • pjmcmullen@comcast.net

  • Baxter Black

  • I’ve never been much into poetry, but this list is a great primer for where to start!

  • Sassoon and my favorite of the great WWI poets, Wilfred Owen, met, not in the trenches, but in a military convalescent hospital. He greatly encouraged Owen in his poetry which resulted in some of the finest war poetry to emerge from that carnage including the heartbreaking “Dulce et Decorum Est”. Wilfred Owen returned to the front and was killed one week before the war’s end.

  • James Whitcomb Riley. My grandfather used to read it to me as a child. Favorite deliciously scary line “an de goblins gonna get you if you don’t watch out”!

  • Wendell Berry ❤️

  • has to be Leonard Cohen

  • Ts eliot

  • Natalie Scenters-Zapico!

  • Padraig O Tuama

  • Amanda Gorman! Wonderful poem at Biden’s Inauguration.

  • e e cummings

  • Ada Límon

  • I have loved so many poets but here are some enduring favorites because I can’t pick just one: Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, and Rupi Kaur.

  • Mary Oliver. There’s a Facebook page for her where poems are posted and I love it.

  • Victoria Wood (she totally counts).

  • Yung Pueblo https://yungpueblo.com/about

  • E. Pauline Johnson

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets

  • Poet, Kalidasa. Yesterday is only a dream…

  • Walt Whitman, please!

  • Walt Whitman

  • Rod McKuen

  • My favorite poet today is Mary Oliver.

  • Billy Collins

  • Mary Oliver

    • Robert Frost

  • Shel Silverstein

    • Yes!

  • Perhaps an odd choice, but listening to Andy Serkis read the Lord of the Rings audiobooks while walking in the woods by my house has made me really appreciate Tolkien’s poems.

  • Maya Angelou. (But Amanda Gorman blew my mind at Biden’s inauguration.)

  • Lucille Clifton and Hafiz

  • Perhaps cliché but I memorized this in HS and 20+ years later this is what comes to mind when someone talks about poetry.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud

  • James Merrill’s
    “The Willowware Cup”
    I read it at the memorial for a dear friend.

  • Dylan Thomas

  • Beloved poets: George Oppen, H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks

  • “Twined and twinned together.” You, sir, are a poet.

  • Maya Angelou.

  • Mary Oliver!

  • Thank you for this rabbit hole. Poetry is a powerful teacher. Comparing any of Sassoon’s post-war poems to Katharine Tynan’s 1914 work, “Joining the Colours”, will make you weep.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57291/joining-the-colours

  • I’ve always loved this poem and use it when I teach young writers: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56159/this-is-just-to-say

  • Robert Frost

  • Mary Oliver

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46431/let-evening-come

    This isn’t a poem but if you haven’t read Regeneration, Pat Barker’s novel about SS, you should.

  • Brian Doyle
    Mary Freaking Oliver
    Walt Whitman
    Emily Beloved Dickinson
    Lyn Lyfshin
    Tony Hoagland
    Emily Sernaker
    Naomi Shihab Nye
    Ross Tangential Gay

  • Mary Oliver is just simply the best!!

  • Philip Larkin: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse

  • Rita Joe

  • Pablo Neruda. Loved studying his poetry with my Spanish class students!

  • WB Yeats

  • Margaret Atwood

  • So many great poets have been mentioned. I’ll add Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the mix with her Sonnets from the Portuguese… esp #43 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43742/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-43-how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-the-ways

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Maya Angelou Still I Rise

  • I love Langston Hughes’ poetry and of course Amanda Gorman

  • This one speaks to me today:

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153025/emily-dickinson-at-the-poetry-slam

  • Joyce Sidman. Her collection What the Heart Knows will always be a favorite.

  • Lynette Reini-Grandell (http://www.reini-grandell.com/).

    Origins
    My grandmother’s mother’s mother thought the world
    started from an egg that rolled,
    fell from a daughter’s knee…

  • David Whyte ♥️

  • Joy Harjo!

  • Rupi Kaur

  • Maggie Smith, especially her “Good Bones”

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones

  • Poet: Dr Seuss!

  • The brilliant young Amanda Gorman of course!!

  • W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues. It’s so accessible, yet poignant.

  • Robert Frost I love Stopping by woods in a snowy evening.

  • I love Mary Oliver’s poems.

  • Have to be Emily Dickenson!

  • Milagros Teran

  • Jorie Graham, Danez Smith, Kay Ryan, Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Brian Teare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rachel Zucker, Brenda Hillman, W.S.Merwin, Heather McHugh, Laura Kashischke …

  • My high school best friend’s mom was a published poet, so I still have a soft spot for the work of Fernandina Beach, FL’s own Nola Perez. Aside from Nola, one of my faves is Billy Collins, and my favorite of his poems is “Litany”, here recited by a 3 year old – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y

  • I wandered lonely as a cloud William Wordsworth
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud

  • Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Amanda Gorman.

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Robert Frost

  • Ted Kooser

  • Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” gets me every time

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/wont-you-celebrate-with-me

  • Robert Frost

  • Mary Oliver

  • maya angelou

  • William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say” — so simple, so sweet

  • John Updike

    Apple

    Since Time began, such alphabets begin
    With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin.
    My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man
    Brought out as well the best in Paul Cézanne.

  • Pablo Neruda

  • Giget was the smartest guinea pig.

  • Mary Oliver and Rumi

  • I’ve recently discovered and enjoy the works of Sheila Murphy.
    Sheila Murphy https://g.co/kgs/aSLH6F

  • Billy Collins

  • A.A.MILNE: AUTHOUR, POET & GENIUS!

  • Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver.

  • Adrianne Rich, love poems.

  • The Lanyard by Billy Collins. Absolutely the funniest, sweetest, most accessible piece of poetry. A gateway poem to future poetry reading. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50975/the-lanyard

  • A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
    by Craig Raine
    https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/a-martian-sends-a-postcard-home

  • Ted Kooser
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52935/abandoned-farmhouse

  • Billy Collins

  • John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44131/a-valediction-forbidding-mourning

  • disobedience by a.a. milne!

  • Emily Dickinson

  • A name not familiar to most, but he’s won a couple of awards. He’s wonderful. He’s also a classmate and friend of mine (and his wife is a poet, too).Dan Simpson!

  • Oh, today it is Yeats!

  • The bean eaters- Gwendolyn Brooks

  • Robert Frost

  • I hate to echo others…but it has to be Robert Frost.

  • e.e. cummings

  • Beloved Poet: Billy Collins

  • Emily Dickinson ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.’

  • Flower Hearted People by Nikita Gill

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Rilke, especially love The Ninth Elegy and Part Two XXIX from the Sonnets to Orpheus

  • e e cummings

  • Shel Silverstein

  • My favorite poet is Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  • Robert Graves. I read one of his poems when I was a teenager and clipped it out of a magazine and saved it. I still have the clipping 50 years later.

  • e.e.cummings

  • Edward Gorey- although I don’t know if his work is considered poetry Hahahah

  • Marge Piercy!

  • Robert Louis Stevenson. I had A Child’s Garden of Verses when I was a child and still some snippets of the poems will come back to me at odd moments

  • Jack Prelutsky

  • Shel Silverstein. My elementary school district had a Peach Festival – any kid who wanted could learn a poem and recite it. 7 year old me thought this was totally fun until I got into the college classroom in front of a judge and totally blanked on the poem! Even worse, I had to recite it a few weeks later in front of the school. I recall my Dad hiding behind the piano just in front of the stage and feeding me the lines! However, I can still tell you which poem, and most of the lines today. Stage fright is a thing!

  • Beloved poet: Anne Sexton

  • e e Cummings, Edna St Vincent Milay

  • One of my favorite poets is Louise Glück. I was gifted her collection “Averno” a few years ago, and was just mesmerized. It was moody and sad and angry and introspective, and still hopeful. Heavy stuff, good for when you want to work through some feelings.

  • Anna Akhmatova — her poem “Requiem” is a marvelous, heart-breaking poetic analysis of the Stalin era

  • A a Milne

  • Oklahoma’s own poet Shaun Perkins! She is a wonderful poet and the curator and founder of the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry where there is nothing stuffy or boring. All ages come to her programs and workshops that often pair making art and writing art. She even put together a poetry vending machine!

  • Since her reading of ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the 2021 inauguration, Amanda Gorman has become a favorite of mine. Her words are so beautiful in their fluidity, often heartbreaking in their candor, and yet somehow they always leave the reader (or listener) with hope.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman

  • Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the most evocative and lyrical writers ever to have walked the earth.

    • Agreed

  • T.S. Eliot

  • My favourite poet is Robert Louis Stevenson ( A child’s garden of verses)

  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/150995/dreams-5d767850da976
    Langston Hughes❤️
    Teacher has students memorize “Dreams” when I was in elementary school. Didn’t realize the poem had two verses until now?!

  • Mary Oliver:)

  • Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath right up there also.

  • e. e. cummings

  • I’ll pick the Irish poet John O’Donohue whose words have been bringing a great deal to my life these past few trying years.

  • Many wonderful poets have been mentioned, and there are lots more, but if owning their works count I’ll have to go with Shell Silver stein!

  • Edgar Allan Poe

    • Antonio Machado

  • Maya Angelou

  • Jim Daniels: The Hidden Beauty of Warren, MI

  • Robert Frost

  • Mary Oliver

  • Edgar Allen Poe 🙂

  • Just read a novel that quoted Rumi throughout. Beautiful. I’ll say Rumi

  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Robert Frost

  • A fave: Mary Oliver

  • Maya Angelou

  • Malcolm Guite

  • A beloved poet of mine is Rainer Maria Rilke & my favorite poem of his is “Der Panther” (The Panther).

  • Mary Oliver

  • Amanda Gorman of course!❣️

  • I’m from Akron, Ohio. The poet I choose is Rita Dove of course! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rita-dove

  • Emily Dickenson
    She sweeps with many colored brooms

    https://allpoetry.com/She-sweeps-with-many-colored-brooms

  • Shel Silverstein.

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Maya Angelou

  • ee cummings, !

  • e. e. cummings

  • i missed the deadline. merde.

  • Mary Oliver is my favorite.

  • Shel Silverstein. I taught preschool and 1st grade. Shel Silverstein was a wonderful way to introduce children to poetry.

  • My favourite poet is Robert Service, who wrote so beautifully about the Canadian Arctic. He captured completely how I feel about the far North: much like the eponymous Sam in the Cremation of Sam McGee, I too was always cold, but was held by the land of gold as if by a spell 🙂 I wish I read more poetry, but I find I only really enjoy it when read aloud with others, and have yet to find people in my life to read with

  • My new favorite, Amanda Gorman!

  • Billy Collins: Questions about Angels. I read this as a prayer for a dear friend for a large gathering of friends and family of all persuasions.

  • e e cummings has been my favorite poet for 6 decades!

  • You need to experience a tournament first of the finest blogs on the net. I’ll suggest this site!

  • Have you tried twitterfeed on your blog, i think it would be cool.,-:`.

  • Everything you need to know about News is very much imptortant to us.

  • Great day”your blog is full of spam, you should should antispam software”    

  • I and my buddies came taking note of the nice advice found on your web blog and then suddenly developed an awful suspicion I never expressed respect to you for those techniques. The men were happy to learn them and have in effect actually been having fun with those things. We appreciate you really being really thoughtful and then for making a choice on variety of magnificent tips millions of individuals are really desirous to know about. Our own sincere apologies for not saying thanks to you sooner.

  • Great post, you have pointed out some fantastic details , I besides conceive this s a very fantastic website.

  • This web page won’t show up correctly on my iphone – you may wanna try and fix that

  • Inquire into various other publisher’s information sites. In the event you communicate insurance jacksonville fl with all the posting local community, anyone are more likely to have the web site go through more regularly. All over again, visitors.

  • There is noticeably big money to understand about this. I suppose you have made certain nice points in functions also.

  • This could be considered a time when you find yourself led to new inspiration, or permit all by yourself to sink into religious confusion!

  • Emotional attention, self-control, approval, adhere to, patience but also security. These are typically among the issues that Tang Soo Can do, most of the Thai martial art attached to self defense purposes, can show buyers plus instilling in your soul the means not just to maintain with your own eyes on the competency on the very first real danger stains to cure confrontation all in all.

  • Quite a few online communities include singles sets which attempt enjoyable click here activities mutually, all this is actually is a good renewable dating approach. Incidents similar to pedaling, bowling, curling, video clip evenings, breaking a leg and comedy club sets tend to be organized with the singles group, but it enables a evenly-distributed group of objectives to have a great as well as laid-back nights. Together with emphasis apply to the actual activity themselves as an alternative to building a romantic connection, you will need plenty of demand journey singles in addition to sights manifest additional the natural way throughout this kind of environment.

  • Attorneys… […]just below, are some totally unrelated sites to ours, however, they are definitely worth checking out[…]…

  • How Can I Become A Webmaster To Make Money Online?: i want to make money and i know being a webmaster is the way t

  • Thanks for writing this. I really feel as though I know so much more about this than I did before. Your blog really brought some things to light that I never would have thought about before reading it. You should continue this, Im sure most people would agree youve got a gift.

  • I was just searching for this info for a while. After six hours of continuous Googleing, at last I got it in your web site. I wonder what is the lack of Google strategy that do not rank this type of informative sites in top of the list. Usually the top web sites are full of garbage.

  • Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article. I will make sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful information. Thanks for the post. I’ll certainly return. que es la gastritis

Come Shop With Us

My Cart0
There are no products in the cart!
Continue shopping