I came across this site with their opinion of the top 10 classical poems.

They might not be my absolute favorites, but I do love them!

Mostly good though personally I prefer "Fire and Ice" to "The Road Not Taken" and I have a genuine and abiding dislike for Daffodils which to me seems only suitable for a Hallmark greetings card. Also never been a great fan of Grecian Urn (though of course without it we might not have the old "What's a Grecian Urn? About fifty drachma a week." joke. Suppose that should be Euros now but somehow that seems to spoil the joke.)

On an almost unrelated note I find that when I am reciting poetry I almost always find myself affecting a Welsh accent. Don't know why - I'm not Welsh - but there it is.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Oh, I do like Daffodils. It reminds me of spring, and my daughter loves daffodils.

I know well that I am in the minority. It was, in a BBC poll, voted as the nations favourite poem (that was some time ago and it has slipped a little but never out of the top five.)

I still say it is more suited to a greetings card than anything else. Without looking it up try to name ANY other poem by Wordsworth.

Yes, I know what you mean by it being suited to greeting cards. And - I can't stand the sayings in greeting cards. I often buy the blank ones and say what I want.

Beats me how a list like this can include Daffodils but omit Gray's Elegy In A Country Churchyard which is, to my mind, the poem that should be in the number one spot.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Yes, I know what you mean by it being suited to greeting cards. And - I can't stand the sayings in greeting cards. I often buy the blank ones and say what I want.

And you can find such lovely blank note cards!

And then you can make the note so much more personal. Sometimes I choose one with a verse, though, if it is perfect. It takes me forever to pick out cards.

Kalleh, it takes forever for me to pick out cards, too. I get irritated when I go to buy a collection of note cards and there may be 2 or 3 designs I like and 1 or 2 that I don't like at all.

I have 3 people in my life who like fairies. So, I bought a box of 100 Cicely Mary Barker postcards of her flower fairies. I will probably have some for the rest of my life. LOL I have been sending them out with haiku poems to go with them, which means I am slow at using them!

By the way, "The Road Not Taken" is one of my favorite poems. For me, it is all about how something speaks to me. I think most of us have been at the point of roads diverging and wanting to take both, or not knowing which one to take.

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.“

quote:

Originally posted by sattva:
... the point of roads diverging and wanting to take both, or not knowing which one to take.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Yogi Berra

MY PICKS made before reading the “10 Best Classical Poems” link:

When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d Walt Whitman

dead heat/ tie: I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
- Emily Dickinson

For Whom the Bell Tolls – John Donne

Ash Wednesday – T S Eliot

Ode on a Grecian Urn – Keats [my personal Keats fave is To Autumn]

The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

My Papa’s Waltz – Theodore Roethke

dead heat/tie: Nick and the Candlestick
The Colossus
- Sylvia Plath

After reading Kalleh’s link, I would have put Shelley’s Ozymandias in there, and Blake’s The Tiger. My “12 Best.”


I have great fondness for these that I memorized in grade school:
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud – Wm Wordsworth
The Highwayman – Alfred Noyes
The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck [Casabianca] – Felicia Hemans
If-- Rudyard Kipling (we used to sing that one!)
The Song of Hiawatha – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ditto for The Tyger and For Whom The Bell Tolls, but I'd toss in Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle...

Oops, right Geoff! OK I'm scratching "Ash Wed" (sorry, T S) & replacing it w/2: Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" -- and (how could we leave out) William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming." Lucky 13.

More contemporary, but has anyone here read Jack Gilbert? https://www.poemhunter.com/jack-gilbert/