A Few Favorite Poems; A Few Over-rated Ones

There are a few poems I never tire of reading or teaching. It almost goes without saying that I simply regard them as very fine poems (for a variety of reasons), but in some cases they are also associated with particular eras of my education. It's probably easier for an outside observer than it is for me to identify the links between the poems. In no particular order, here are a few of my favorites:

"The Windhover" and "God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins
"I'm Nobody" and "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed," by Emily Dickinson
"Harlem" and "Theme for English B," by Langston Hughes
"Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner," by Randall Jarrell
"My Last Duchess," by Robert Browning
"Yet Do I Marvel" and "Incident," by Countee Cullen
"Snake," by D.H. Lawrence
"in just spring," by e.e. cummings
"Poem About My Rights," by June Jordan
"Dulce Et Decorum Est," by Wilfred Owen
"My Last Door," by Wendy Bishop
"Auto Wreck," "The Fly," and "Drugstore," by Karl Shapiro
"The Waking," by Theodore Roethke
"The World Is Too Much With Us," by William Wordsworth
"Kubla Khan," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
selected haiku by Basho
"Abou ben Adhem" and "Jenny Kissed Me," by Leigh Hunt
"La Vie C'est La Vie," by Jessie Redmon Fauset
"This Is Just To Say," by William Carlos Williams
"Silence in the Snowy Fields," by Robert Bly
"Ode to Watermelon," by Pablo Neruda
"Musee des Beaux Arts" and "The Unknown Citizen," and "The Ballad of Miss Gee" by W.H. Auden
"Four Poems for Robin," by Gary Snyder
"The Yellow House on the Corner" and "Parsley" by Rita Dove
"Hill People," by Bill Hotchkiss
"The Second Coming," by W.B. Yeats
"Stopping by Woods," by Robert Frost
"For the Union Dead," by Robert Lowell
"The Vanity of Human Wishes," by Samuel Johnson
"Ode to Melancholy," by John Keats
"Purse Seine," by Robinson Jeffers
"Canticle of the Birds," by William Everson
you pick one, by A.E. Housman

Some poems I think are over-rated (but whose stature will remain unaffected--imagine that!--by my opinion):

"Leda and the Swan," by W.B. Yeats; this is a silly poem, in my opinion; she would simply have strangled the ridiculous bird; and in the end, it's just about rape and doesn't exactly seem opposed to it.
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," by Dylan Thomas; technically, a great villanelle, but the sentiment is impertinent; people can choose how they go into that good night, thank you very much.
"The Road Not Taken," almost always misinterpreted--that's not really Frost's fault.
"Mending Wall," by Frost; I don't know why, but this poem bugs me.
"Hugh Selwyn Mauberly," by Ezra Pound; nicely put together, but . . .?
Howl, by Allen Ginsberg; parts of it are great, but sometimes it's Whine.
"Sunday Morning," by Wallace Stevens; a great achievement in verse, no doubt about that, but in the end, it's about a wealthy woman having a good morning.
"Lycidas," by John Milton; I agree with Sam Johnson on this one.