The Best Poems According to a Professor Who Teaches the Best 100
This list was written by DeSales Harrison, a professor at Oberlin College and author of The Waters & The Wild.
Each year I teach a course called “One Hundred Poems.” Many students take it, I suspect, because they see the title and think, “How hard could it be to read 100 poems over a semester? Heck, it couldn’t be that hard to read a 100 poems over a weekend.” It’s designed for non-majors, for people who have committed to another course of study, neuroscience say, or philosophy, and the course always enrolls many students from Oberlin’s great conservatory, opera singers, and bassoon players, and composers of electronic music. Some students are first-years, others just about to graduate. Some are Turkish, some Taiwanese, some are from Cleveland or Silver Spring. In short, the course is composed of a jumble of students who take the course for a jumble of reasons, and the syllabus itself is a jumble of poems. That syllabus changes every year, and it expands and contracts too, so I should probably call the course “100 or so poems,” or better yet, “Actually, Nowhere Near 100 Poems, if We’re Being Honest.”
I choose the poems we discuss according to two criteria. The poem should be in English. The poem should become a friend for life. How do I know if a poem can become a friend for life? It has to have proved this capacity to me. I teach, in short, poems that have demonstrated faithful friendship to me for many years. Teaching these poems is a way of offering young people similar friendships, and it is a way I can pay back these friends for all that they have given me over my life.
When I developed the course the first time, I just sifted through all the poems I’ve read and thought about, and chose the hundred that best fit this description. 100 seemed like a nice round number. So for poetry month, I’ve sifted through that 100 to come up with this list. Like all friendships, these poems require patience, forbearance, and good will, and like the best friendships, they will repay whatever you give them with a lifetime of surprise, encouragement, reproof, and love.
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Add to BookshelfA Shropshire Lad and Other Poems
by A.E. Housman
“A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” by A.E. Housman
If there is one poem on this list that you should memorize, it’s this one. A.E. Housman, pessimist, classicist and connoisseur of melancholy, was also one the greatest formal masters of his age. The elements he employs here are deceptively familiar: the rhymed quatrain, thoughts of spring, thoughts of the passage of time. But there is no poem I know of that treats with such consummate address the perennial shock of earth’s renewal, an ever-refreshed newness that for all its glory strikes a dissonant chord with our advancing age, even if the age of the speaker in question is only 20, as it is here. The brevity of the poem is of a piece with the brevity of life’s most luminous moments, and indeed, with the brevity of life itself.
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The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint
by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 65: “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea” by William Shakespeare
This poem poses the question that all art poses, what use is beauty in the face of inevitable decay, of time’s “all oblivious enmity” from which nothing, not even earth and sea, are protected? “How with such rage can beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower.” The poem gives us two answers to this question, one credible, and one incredible. The credible answer is that nothing can stand, not the overwhelming beauty of youth, not the unchangeable elements of earth. “O none,” writes Shakespeare, “unless this miracle have might / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” That would be a miracle indeed, and to the extent that ww’re reading Shakespeare’s poem, the miracle has proved true. But the “unless” suspends us in a world of doubt. The lovers in question are now dead, and the blackness of oblivion is present even in miraculous ink. Great art survives, at least for a while. But even the greatest artists, and the most passionate lovers, fall prey to “sad mortality.”
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The Complete Poetry
by George Herbert
“Love (III)” by George Herbert
Diametrically opposed to Yeate’s dark vision of history is George Herbert’s understanding of God’s love. But understanding is not the right word. For Herbert, God’s love is always greater, wider, and deeper than anything human understanding can encompass. It welcomes the speaker in “Love (III)” and the speaker responds with gallant courtesy, protesting his own unworthiness, and expressing a form of witty humility that only barely masks complacent self-regard. The speaker begins to register Love’s sincerity by beginning to believe his own unworthiness. He wants to look away, anywhere but at his benefactor. “Who made the eyes but I?” says Love, with a shiver of severity. “What do you need?” asks Love. “A guest, worthy of the honor,” says the speaker. That would be you, Love declares. If you say so, says the speaker, but let me serve then. But Love commands him to sit “and taste my meat.” In a flash at the end of the poem, we see, along with the speaker, that this Love is one that nourishes its beloved with its own substance, like the legendary pelican believed to feed her young with her own blood. The poem quite literally falls silent at the moment of this recognition.
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The Complete Poems
by Walt Whitman
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman
Poetry and nature seem always to have gone hand in hand, whether in Latin pastoral elegies of Horace or in the rural meditations of Wordsworth or Frost. But it also trades in a form of radical proximity, the soul speaking to itself, the lover speaking to the beloved. The space and isolation of rural life, therefore, may have less to do with the deepest poetic concerns than we have been inclined to think. This is the question that Walt Whitman puts to us. What is the poetry of the swarming city, where one finds oneself pressed up not against one’s beloved or even oneself, but against perfect strangers, on omnibuses or ferries? Whitman’s sublime genius pushes him further to ask what kinds of intimate, anonymous communities unite a poet to his readers, even readers like you or me who live generations later. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is Whitman’s great inquiry into this question, and the answer he provides is that poetry confers upon each of us citizenship in a city outside time, an ecstatic intimacy in which we are free to pour our meanings into one another, and to behold one another, even across centuries, face to face.
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Complete Poems
by Marianne Moore
“The Fish” by Marianne Moore
Don’t get discouraged by Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish,” even though at first it appears daunting, inexplicable, and resolutely hostile to decipherment. Jeez, it’s not even about a fish, or some fish, one thinks, noticing that the title is really just the first two words of the poet’s first sentence. And what, pray tell, does it mean (if anything) to say that the fish “wade / through black jade.”? Fish don’t wade, and even if they could, you don’t wade through jade, do you? And anyway, jade isn’t black, is it?
In a kind of reverse “Jerry McGuire” moment, a reader might be forgiven for giving up, saying “you lost me at ‘The’. I might as well spend my time staring at a rock wall.” As it happens, however, the poem is about staring at a rock wall, specifically, a rocky cliff-face battered ceaselessly by the sea. Sure there are fish somewhere around because this is the ocean, and things seem to flourish joyously in the ocean, along with jellyfish, starfish, shellfish, unnamed tiny pink things, crabs, and “submarine toadstools,” oblivious to the fact that their hectic octopu’s garden is slamming again and again into the shore. The shore, the cliff-face, is not impervious. In fact, its countenance is what Picasso might have called a “horde of destructions.” Disfigured, scarred, battered, it stands as a monument to its own endurance, and manifests a different kind of life from the riotous organismic life of the sea. It lives without “reviving its youth,” without reproduction or regeneration. It lives by holding out, a fastness in which even the sea grows old. Its beauty is mute, severe, damaged, and opaque, but all the more superb for that. It shows us the sublime beauty of endurance, which is, for Moore, the greatest beauty of all.
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