I saw the massive list of favorite poets and I couldn't choose one, so I went for poems that stuck out in my mind. In no particular order:
-"Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth. "These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man's eye" Whew.
-"Old Movies" by August Kleinzahler. Live from the Hong Kong Nile club might be one of my favorite books of poems of all time.
-"The Waste Land" by Eliot. Can't get much more canonical, but there's a reason everyone talks about it so much.
-"Odi et amo" by Catullus. Yeah I know, its in Latin, but I just finished a course on him and found him to be as modern as some 20th century poets at times. The translated version is "I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you might ask. / I do not know, but I feel it happen, and I am tortured." Its a lot sharper in Latin, so I'll put that in here too:
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.
-Ok, enough of that Latin stuff. Another two-liner I like is "In the Station of a Metro" by Ezra Pound. The Imagists were kinda gimmicky, but they had the right idea.
I think I'll stop myself now and give someone else a chance.
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