Anthology
It is an undergraduate computer-science problem to show that rigorously selecting one’s ten favorite poems would require infinite processing time, so this is an approximation. I feel sort of lame having picked such a stack of canonical names, and sticking entirely to English, but it’s these that do it for me. No, the Romantic era never ended; shut up.
Thomas Wyatt - “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where is an Hind”
William Blake - “The Clod and the Pebble”
S.T. Coleridge - “Frost at Midnight”
John Keats - “This Living Hand”
Emily Dickinson - “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”
W.B. Yeats - “Adam’s Curse”
Wilfred Owen - “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”
T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land
Wallace Stevens - “The Idea of Order at Key West”
Elizabeth Bishop - “Sestina”
And squeezing in as the eleventh, because it’s so short:
Robert Herrick - “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
