At our summer AOS Mini-Con, I gave a talk on appreciating poetry. My goals were to give the attendees some tips on how to make poetry more fun and approachable and to offer a different way to think about poetry than the one many of were taught in school (which, in my opinion, contributes to most people's hatred of poetry).
I want to share with my readers as much of the content of this talk as possible. I am still working on uploading video (so if you know how to do that, please email me, cause I am having no luck), but I thought I could at least share my handout.
There is a list of the poems I read aloud in the class and a list of lots of other poems I really enjoy. You should be able to find all of these poems online. When I figure out how to do vidoes, I will start posting some of my tips and videos of my readings of poems which illustrate that particular tip.
Poems I Read in Class:
Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 105-116 and 250-263 by John Milton
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe
“Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats
“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” by e.e. cummings
“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell
“Daffodils” by William Wordsworth
“The Poplar Field” by William Cowper
My Favorite Anthology:
The Top 500 Poems edited by William Harmon
Other favorites of mine that you might like:
“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
“Sonnet 73” by William Shakespeare
“Sonnet 29” by William Shakespeare
“Death Be Not Proud” by John Donne
“Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God” by John Donne
“Sonnet 2: Written at the close of Spring” by Charlotte Smith
“Sonnet 44: Written in the churchyard at Middleton in Sussex” by Charlotte Smith
“Sonnet 57: To Dependence” by Charlotte Smith
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Tine” by Robert Herrick
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray
“The Castaway” by William Cowper
“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
“Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“She Walks in Beauty” by George Gordon, Lord Byron
“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
“How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“The Lotus Eaters” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman
“I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman
“God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson
“To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman
“Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats
“When You Are Old” by W.B. Yeats
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by W.B. Yeats
“A Prayer for My Daughter” by W.B. Yeats
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
“Birches” by Robert Frost
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost
“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” by John Crowe Ransom
“Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Richard Wilbur
“The Writer” by Richard Wilbur
