Poetry Canon

[Monk]

This is my first post here, but some of you probably know me.

I'm trying to cover most of Literature for my team, and I've set out to read (or at least read excerpts from) the poetry cannon. The only problem is that I don't have a very good list of what it is, which is the whole reason I'm setting about this task.

[Kouign Amann]

I recommend starting out with poets you like, and then moving to those they influenced or their influences, and just kinda creating a nice web like that. Also, picking up a poetry anthology could be good.

[Auroni]

The very basic canon:

English:
Renaissance-era poets (most notably Shakespeare; also Marlowe, Sidney, etc.)
Metaphysical, Cavalier poets (Donne, Lovelace, Herrick, Marvell, Milton, Jonson etc.)
Enlightenment-era (Swift, Johnson, Pope, Cibber, Dryden, etc.)
Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Burns (sometimes))
Victorian poets (Matthew Arnold, the Brownings, Tennyson, C. Rosetti)
Turn of the century (Eliot, Auden, Yeats, etc.)
Modern (Hughes, Larkin, etc.)

These are just off the top of my head, so there are quite a few that I'm missing. But these are the major poets of British canon. To get a base, you have to be familiar with their most famous works. If you're set on reading poetry, this would be the place to start. Someone can compose a similar list for American, European, and World poetry.

[azngod1992]

Although not strictly poetry, the Stanford culture guide index provides a great starting place for literature canon (and other categories as well): http://ai.stanford.edu/~csewell/culture/

[at your pleasure]

poetry cannon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great ... Nelson.JPG
Now that that's out of the way, you should pick up a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Poetry. There's a lot of stuff that won't come up, but also a lot of stuff that will. Also, yeah, just read poets you come across and like.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

That is such an old joke.