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50 poems to print and hang on the wall

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William Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet CXLIII’ makes Simcha’s top 50 poems to share with your kids.

Every so often, I get a bee in my bonnet about poetry. When we homeschooled, we read and sometimes memorised poems. We’ve since moved on to other kinds of schooling, and it’s been a good choice, overall. But to my everlasting chagrin, so many teachers teach my kids that poetry is a kind of catch basin for emotion.

Prose, they learn, is for when you have orderly thoughts to express with precision; but poetry is the place to open the floodgates and wallow, and nobody can possibly say you’re doing it wrong, because there are no rules.

And this is true, as long as the poetry is utter garbage.

This utter garbage approach to poetry accounts for why so many young people love to write but hate to read poetry. Wallowing feels great when you’re in the middle of it (when you’re in the mood), but no healthy person likes to watch someone else flail around aimlessly in the muck.

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A good poem works in the opposite way: The writer does all the work, and the reader — well, the reader has to do some work, too, but if he’s willing, he’ll be rewarded with something of great and lasting value. Have you seen an uncut, unpolished diamond? It doesn’t look like much. Most of its beauty is in its potential, and it’s not until it’s carefully, skillfully cut and polished that it sparkles and reflects the light.

The same is true with the ideas and passions that animate poetry. In a formless stream-of-consciousness poem that’s allowed to spill itself thoughtlessly onto the page, the ideas and passions that animate it may be present, but they won’t do much for the reader until they’re brought out by skillfull, time-consuming wordsmithing and ruthless editing.

Ruthless editing is part of what makes a good poem

Of course, you can make perhaps the opposite mistake, and approach a well-crafted poem the way a dealer approaches a precious jewel, and think only of what it can deliver. This is what Billy Collins protested against in his poem, Introduction to Poetry. He pleads with his students to listen to, to live with a poem; to encounter it on its own terms, to experience it. To hear the sounds it makes and be open to the various things they might suggest.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope 
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose 
to find out what it really means.

People who teach poetry this way should be sent to work in the salt mines. They can meet up with the wallowers once a week and think about what they’ve done wrong.

Anyway, as I mentioned, every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet and start printing out poetry and tacking it up on the walls of my house. I pin up a new batch every year or so, and once they become tattered enough, I tell myself they’ve probably been read by somebody. I’m far too tired and busy to lead any seminars, but at least it’s something.

The theory is that it’s possible to ruin a wonderful poem by torturing a message or moral out of it, and it’s possible to miss out on the power and import of a good poem by skimming over the surface of it and not stopping to consider why it’s made the way it is; but at least with the second error, you’ve had a moment of pleasure. And if the thing is hanging around long enough and the poem is good enough, you’re bound to let it inside your head, where it may colonise.

50 poems to try in your home

Here are some lists of poems I’ve hung in the past, in no particular order. Most of them are short enough to print out on a single page.

The Tyger” William Blake
Still, Citizen Sparrow” Richard Wilbur
Dust of Snow”  Robert Frost
Spring and Fall” G.M. Hopkins
Love (III)” George Herbert
“Thirteen Ways of Looking At a  Blackbird” Wallace Stevens
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” (from A Shropshire Lad) A. E. Housman
“Epistemology” Richard Wilbur
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” William Butler Yeats
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” Dylan Thomas
“maggie and milly and molly and may” e. e. cummings
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” Lewis Carroll
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” Robert Frost
“Mock On,  Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” William Blake
“At the Sea-Side” Robert Lewis Stevenson
“Marginalia” Richard Wilbur
I Knew a Woman” Theodore Roethke
“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” William Wordsworth
Where Did You Come From, Baby Dear?” by George MacDonald
As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
Intimations of Immortality” (excerpt – the stanza with “trailing clouds of glory do we come”) by Wordsworth
Inversnaid”by G. M. Hopkins
Macavity the Mystery Cat” by T.S. Eliot
The Beautiful Changes” by Richard Wilbur”
Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost
God’s Grandeur” by G. M. Hopkins
“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur
The Garden” by Ezra Pound
“Cold Are the Crabs” by Edward Lear
“Domination of Black “by Wallace Stevens
“A Hero” by Robert Service
“Having Misidentified a Wildflower”by Richard Wilbur
“The Lanyard” by Billy Collins
“Sonnet CXLIII” by Shakespeare
“Sea Calm” by Langston Hughes
“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns
“Trolling for blues “by Richard Wilbur
“Examination at the womb door ” by Ted Hughes
“The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams
End of Summer” by Stanley Kunitz
Faith” by Maria Terrone
Gazebos” by Roger McGough
Eulogie” by Sherman Alexie
Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas
Walking West” by William E. Stafford
The Gift” by Louise Gluck
The Lesson of the Moth” by Don Marquis
There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” by Donald Justice
No Time “by Billy Collins
The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska

If you love poetry, what would you add?

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