Essential Titles

a listicle from my 2003 blog

I like the idea of Essential Titles, though my
concept of a canon changes from decade to decade.
So here’s a list of mine, with the caveat that
no list can be either representative or exhaustive; it’s
making such a list that’s instructive...

Propertius- Elegiae (30/16 BC). I know, no one can
consider themselves educated who isn’t conversant with
the Aeneid, but for me Propertius is the one essential
poet of Classical Antiquity. He takes all the tools so pain-
stakingly developed by his predecessors, & uses them in
amazingly virtuosic & personal ways. Compared with
Propertius, Catullus (his only rival in the elegy) is heavy
handed & all too direct. Propertius will always be absolutely
up to date. [Note- I use the Loeb edition so i can
refer to the Latin. He has not been served well by trans-
lators, perhaps because they are hard put just to
capture his sense, much less his music. Pound at least
caught a little of his tone...]

Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). This is the beginning of
poetry in English, & every song on the radio has its origin
somewhere in here. Shakespeare was of course the
consummate wielder of what might be called “the music
of grammar”--& his study will not be finished in a life-
time--yet this first anthology shows just what he
started with in that long ago era before dictionaries
when the poets really were the makers of speech.

Donne- Songs & Sonnets (1633). Just when the
lyric had been perfected, someone comes along with a
whole new game--combining a philosophical point of
view with the personal note lost for a thousand years--
& we are still trying to duplicate his results.

Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). The modern
world, with all its alienation & dark glories, rendered
into sonorous & enduring form. There are several decent
translations available; Baudelaire loses surprisingly
little in the process; in that respect he is like Dostoevsky:
the impact of the message continues, like a Molotov
cocktail thrown through a stained glass window...

Housman- A Shropshire Lad (1896). You could say that
Housman is essentially a trivial writer, but in this age of
egregious untidiness it is good to remember that perfect
poems can & have been written. [More Poems & Last
Poems also contain many necessary lyrics.]

Mallarmé- Poésies (1898). If you only learn one
foreign language & only a bit of that, do try to scope out
Mallarmé in the original. Untranslatable, the inventor of
Modernism & the culmination of the literary tradition,
what can i say? Yet he wears it very lightly... His best
poems are about little things, flickers or the wave of
a fan, & thus connect with the Japanese poetic tradition.
Weinfeld’s Collected Poems (1994) is bilingual &
includes the prose poems.

Stein- Tender Buttons (1914). I can’t add anything
to my Amazon review.

Stevens- Harmonium (1923). Most of Stevens’s best
poems. It is worth a concentrated study to inquire how much
of French Symbolism has been captured & how much lost;
he also, without even trying, spares you the necessity of
reading any Imagism.

Jeffers- The Roan Stallion (1924). A lot of people don’t
like Jeffers, but he can’t be ignored. There isn’t another
such vatic writer in modern times; & his eye is always on
the land--something too easily lost in 20c verse.

Auden- Poems (1930) & The Orators (1932). You’d’ve
thought T S Eliot had said the last word in Modernism, & suddenly
this guy drags in Anglo-Saxon meters & the best imitation of
schiz-lit this side of Finnegans Wake. He also sets the
bar for a unified collection very high with the latter work--&
people are still arguing over what it means.

Riding- Poems of Laura Riding (1938). The most original voice
of the 20c. She accomplishes some of the same things Mallarmé
did, without sounding anything like him. [Her cantankerous critical
writings are also essential.]

Rexroth- One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955). I can’t
think of another book that so effortlessly teaches the essence of
another poetic tradition. A good antidote to the Eliot-Pound-Joyce
triumvirate.

Plath- Collected Poems (1981). Forget the myth. She was the
last Symbolist, & the greatest poet of the later 20c. Only fools despise
her.

Merwin- The Second Four Books of Poems (1993). Merwin is very
hit-or-miss, often lapses into self-pastiche, & seldom rises to the level
of great poetry. Still, when you read in these books long enough, you
realize he captures something that most other 20c writers never
even noticed--the subtragic grayness of daily life--& gives it
definitive expression.

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Besides this, maybe Rilke’s letters & that Snyder essay.

(Xvarenah, August, 2003)