Scan barcode
A review by crispymerola
100 Best-Loved Poems by John Keats, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Li Bai, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edmund Waller, Marianne Moore, Alfred Tennyson, E.E. Cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrew Marvell, Emily John Donne, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Wyatt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Carl Sandburg, John Milton, Philip Smith, George Meredith, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Robert Burns, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Gray, William Blake, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Richard Lovelace, A.E. Housman, Robert Herrick, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, William Cullen Bryant, William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Leigh Hunt, Ben Jonson, Robert Frost, Christina Rossetti
challenging
slow-paced
3.0
Alternative Title - "O White Boi's, My White Boi's"
Reading poetry often brings me back to my confused upbringing, where I pored over psalms and prayers, hoping to feel or understand what it was everyone insisted was so important about Jesus and God. If I only squinted hard enough, or approached the altar of the good book with a pure enough spirit - then, THEN I'd be graced with the understanding that eluded me. I'd get the hype.
Many many days later, I grew up and realized religion wasn't for me. I found that these texts held their power not between their words, but between the people who believed the words.
This is pretty much how I feel about most poetry.
I'm giving up on trying to glean the value in everything I read. Half of these beloved poems are useless to me - empty, horny, dramatic scribblings which conjure no meaningful imagery or make any salient points beyond "gosh, milady, you're beautiful," and, "let's fuck bc we finna die," and, "golly gee, I love God and the trees he made".
Another quarter of the poems have a line or two that made an impression or gave me a thought. The last quarter were truly meaningful, and felt more like fully formed stories or arguments writ in verse. So, let's give this thing three stars and I can continue ignoring poetry until I die.
Reading poetry often brings me back to my confused upbringing, where I pored over psalms and prayers, hoping to feel or understand what it was everyone insisted was so important about Jesus and God. If I only squinted hard enough, or approached the altar of the good book with a pure enough spirit - then, THEN I'd be graced with the understanding that eluded me. I'd get the hype.
Many many days later, I grew up and realized religion wasn't for me. I found that these texts held their power not between their words, but between the people who believed the words.
This is pretty much how I feel about most poetry.
I'm giving up on trying to glean the value in everything I read. Half of these beloved poems are useless to me - empty, horny, dramatic scribblings which conjure no meaningful imagery or make any salient points beyond "gosh, milady, you're beautiful," and, "let's fuck bc we finna die," and, "golly gee, I love God and the trees he made".
Another quarter of the poems have a line or two that made an impression or gave me a thought. The last quarter were truly meaningful, and felt more like fully formed stories or arguments writ in verse. So, let's give this thing three stars and I can continue ignoring poetry until I die.