Any recs for babby's first poetry book?

Any recs for babby's first poetry book?

Stop listening to Joy Division, David

ffs, just search baby's first poetry book on amazon, it's by jane yolen

Eliot or Whitman. Failing that, Bukowski.

this, early Eliot is a great yardstick
read it.
come back after reading a bunch and read it again
come back again
read it again

No. Also my name is Eric.

Wtf I was told Eliot should be one of the last things I read.

Nah, just the Waste Land and $ Quarters

Stuff like The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is great to pick up poetry with

whatever you decide to start with though....
READ OUT LOUD
it's sooo soo important to poetry that it can't be overstated.

4 Quartets*

What about Ash Wednesday?

reading something you may not be ready for won't actively damage you. I would encourage going with whatever seems interesting (as long as you don't go: lol The Cantos look cool, you'll be fine) Prufrock is what got me into to poetry just kidding I started with Plath, and she's amazing[spoiler/]

Limericks are a good way into poetry as they are simple. Edward Lear is the best for limericks. Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden) and The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan. Sonnets are a bit more complex than limericks, but they are quite popular like the limerick. Get an anthology like Norton's (shorter) or other and find what you might like, and look up movements and other authors related to the poems you like in the anthology. Use A Poetry Handbook to write your own poems and to better understand poetry in general.

who else you like ?

The Cantos of Ezra Pound

my diary desu

start with the romantics and end with the romantics

I would recommend the Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy published by Everyman's Lybrary.

>whatever you decide to start with though....
>READ OUT LOUD
>it's sooo soo important to poetry that it can't be overstated.

Why ?

>this is what plebs actually think
Eliot is fucking next level if you actually stop and think about what he's saying and doing in poetry instead of
>oh LE MY FEELS prufrock is so le neurotic no?
OP dont listen to these people or else you're gonna be one of those people in poetry general threads posting in free verse because le neuroticism

Read Donne first. The Flea is a really great poem about analyzing the language of poetry and how it can shape a poem. The sunne rising is another good one. Dont just read poetry for the sake of it. Really look hard into all the things the author is doing. With metre, rhyme scheme, verse structure, figure, symbolism, allegory, allusion, diction, syntax, word choice etc etc. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Yeats, Whitman, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, Frost, Burns, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats. These are all names you should familiarize yourself with, each a kind of brilliant poet in his own right. (except shelley)

Only then will you be ready to tackle the modernists.

just get any antology of poetry from your country. There is no such thing like universal poetry

Sexton, Williams, Sir Phillip Sidney, ee, Gregory Fraser (Georgia contemp writer), Pound, H.D., Dickinson, Jack Donne, I'm finally coming around to getting into Shakes.

A large amount of writer's (especially modernists) plat with sonics in ways that you might not pick up on even if you subvocalize. That sonic play can frequently change the feel of the poem. Perfect example is the specfic type of rhymes in Daddy, where Plath forces the sounds of a nursery rhyme to come through changing the tone slightly (but i think importantly)

I said to use him as a yardstick, not to just read Prufrock over and over. Why should he become an academic, before attempting to enjoy any of it? It is possible to understand babby's fist techniques without 'studying' the people you decide should be studied.

Death of a Naturalist

The Iliad.

Read Shakespeare's sonnets my brother

frank o'hara collected poems

Where The Sidewalk Ends

Ashbury, nig.