My Favorite Poems

General
1

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

This essay here about Frost's work is good: see Waiting for Form by Tyler Malone | Poetry Foundation
part X: X. Something White, Uncertain

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2

@thesimplepleasuresofthepoor
I read a good bit of Fussel's Poetic Meter; I wanted to make my way through some of the New Critics books (Cleanth Brooks Well Wrought Urn) but I don't frankly have the discipline. Wimsatt's stuff is supposed to be good aswell.

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3

I have nma talking about postmodernism, but I feel the need to stress how bad contemporary stuff is. Poetry is Hell.

I'm subscribed to their newsletter and am I greeted with shit like this all of the time.

4

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5

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6

Another one I liked; I read The Fugitives book.

There's a bunch of journals these guys were associated with between like 1920-1970 and the analysis and stuff they posit in them is really great -- you can see the actual developmetn of new criticism

Stuff like the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, etc. before it got trashed. You can generally look at The Fugitives and their associates and figure out what journals they edited and find decent stuff. You can get a free account on JSTOR and they give you like 100 downloads a month.

7

If you're legitimately interested in speaking to me you should just get my email off nmaGane and email me. YOu could get it off my github aswell

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8

THE TOLLUND MAN
I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

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