Ten Poems

There's been a trend circulating on Facebook where you make a list of ten poems that have "stayed with you." They have to be the first ten poems that come to mind, and you can't take more than ten minutes to compile your list. Here's mine, with annotations.

[Note: I'm aware that this reads like a suggested reading list for a poetry appreciation course from the 1950s (mostly white male Romantics and Modernists). This means that either a) I have fantastic taste and am drawn only to the time-tested classics, or b) I've been thoroughly indoctrinated to love canonical verse as written by The Man. You tell me.]

1. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (Reading this feels better than reading scripture, and I almost always cry when I read the last section.)
   
2. John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale" (Another tear jerker. Something about the way Keats buzzes back and forth between fecundity and death, beauty and its trasience--gah!)
   
3. Robert Frost, "Choose Something Like a Star" (This poem literally gets stuck in my head. I love how he tinkers with voice and concludes with a message that sounds like your scolding Aunt Melinda when she's really on fire.)
   
4. Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" (I've meditated on this poem more than any other. It haunted me for a few years.)
   
5. T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (The first poem I read in high school that made me think that poetry was the best thing ever. Here we go round the prickly pear!)
   
6. T. S. Eliot, "Preludes" (One of the most musically perfect poems I've ever heard. Eliot is able to imply so much with a hint and an image that this poem is a wonder to me.)
   
7. Robert Frost, "A Prayer in Spring" (Frost presents raw fear in the guise of a prayer of thanks. I love how Frost can write a line of verse that says one thing and means another entirely.
   
8. John Donne, "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star" (I picked this poem for its humor and surprise, but I could have chosen any of Donne's. I love him for the way he twists my brain into frightful and compelling knots, blending sex, religion, death, love, and humor together in only a few lines.)
   
9. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Art of Losing" (The form is beautiful and breezy and belies the pain that explodes out of the last line. So damn subtle and good.)
   
10. Ted Kooser, "December 25" (This is one of those poems I love because I identify with its plot and emotion so completely. Of course worry would be a squirrel!)