“I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.” Anne Sexton
Honestly, any poetry is DA poetry if you can recite it from memory or sound intelligent while speaking of it.
• T. S. Elliot
Didn’t write much poetry, but what he did write is dense with meaning
• Wisława Szymborska
Any of her poems are instant winners, for a great collection I would recommend Map: Collected and Last Poems
• William Shakespeare
Classic, cannot go wrong with any of his works
• Anne Sexton
For bonus points, listen to the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel based on the poem “45 Mercy Street”
• John Milton
Paradise Lost is always recognizable by name
• Homer
Both The IliadandThe Odyssey are the best known works, bonus points if you are able to read them in their original Greek for the full effect
• Edgar Allen Poe
Although The Raven is his most notable work of poetry, his short stories are also enjoyable
• Robert Frost
An acquired taste compared to my other favourite poets, but my top four are definitely “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Acquainted With the Night”
• Mark Twain
Recognizable in name and work
• Lord Byron
An older poet, much of his language is obsolete in the modern era yet conveys meanings we could not hope to comprehend without it
• Sappho
An excellent romantic, “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” Bonus points if you read it in the original Greek for the full effect
• Walt Whitman
The modern-day version of a classical poet: free verse is his specialty!
• Edgar Allan Poe
The O.G. dark academic, the literature teacher’s favourite Halloween lesson. Nothing can beat the simple and unsettling Poetry of Poe!
• Oscar Wilde
Nothing will ever be as iconic as The Picture of Dorian Gray has become in the DA aesthetic! a definite must-read.
All during the fall I love you. When the leaves change, when the frost comes, when the cover goes on the pool, when the Thanksgiving turkey is ready, when the stores put up their Christmas lights…I love you
I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.” ― Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back
—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of The Island/ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women/ Unknown/ John Keats, To The Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned/ Anne Sexton, Suicide Note: The Complete Poems/ Irish Murdoch, The Italian Girls/ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath/ Anne Sexton, The Truth the Dead Know/ Virginia Woolf, The Waves/ Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Sonnets
