in no particular order:
T. S Eliot, Four Quartets
James Wright, "With the Shell of a Hermit Crab"
Robert Lowell, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"
Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around"
James Dickey, "The Sheep Child"
Percy Shelley, "The Witch of Atlas"
Genesis, King James Bible
Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"
James Merrill, "The Octopus"
Milton, Paradise Lost
Where are the women, I wonder, when I look at this list. Where are the men and women of color? The world poems, the Southwest poems, the border poems, the experimental poems? --Not part of my education in the beginning, truthfully. My training was almost purely canonical until I got to grad school. I suppose that's the hazard of being an English major at a college that believes in teaching literary tradition, and Smith College did, at the time. Don't know if that's changed. That was 10 years ago. --Anyway, I don't regret it. I love these poems.
