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A review by crispymerola
100 Best-Loved Poems by Andrew Marvell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., A.E. Housman, Robert Browning, John Milton, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats, Henry Vaughan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, E.E. Cummings, John Keats, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marianne Moore, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Blake, Robert Frost, George Meredith, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Waller, Li Bai, Leigh Hunt, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, Carl Sandburg, Philip Smith, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Nashe, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron
challenging
slow-paced
3.0
Alternative Title - "O White Boi's, My White Boi's"
Reading poetry often brings me back to my confused upbringing, where I pored over psalms and prayers, hoping to feel or understand what it was everyone insisted was so important about Jesus and God. If I only squinted hard enough, or approached the altar of the good book with a pure enough spirit - then, THEN I'd be graced with the understanding that eluded me. I'd get the hype.
Many many days later, I grew up and realized religion wasn't for me. I found that these texts held their power not between their words, but between the people who believed the words.
This is pretty much how I feel about most poetry.
I'm giving up on trying to glean the value in everything I read. Half of these beloved poems are useless to me - empty, horny, dramatic scribblings which conjure no meaningful imagery or make any salient points beyond "gosh, milady, you're beautiful," and, "let's fuck bc we finna die," and, "golly gee, I love God and the trees he made".
Another quarter of the poems have a line or two that made an impression or gave me a thought. The last quarter were truly meaningful, and felt more like fully formed stories or arguments writ in verse. So, let's give this thing three stars and I can continue ignoring poetry until I die.
Reading poetry often brings me back to my confused upbringing, where I pored over psalms and prayers, hoping to feel or understand what it was everyone insisted was so important about Jesus and God. If I only squinted hard enough, or approached the altar of the good book with a pure enough spirit - then, THEN I'd be graced with the understanding that eluded me. I'd get the hype.
Many many days later, I grew up and realized religion wasn't for me. I found that these texts held their power not between their words, but between the people who believed the words.
This is pretty much how I feel about most poetry.
I'm giving up on trying to glean the value in everything I read. Half of these beloved poems are useless to me - empty, horny, dramatic scribblings which conjure no meaningful imagery or make any salient points beyond "gosh, milady, you're beautiful," and, "let's fuck bc we finna die," and, "golly gee, I love God and the trees he made".
Another quarter of the poems have a line or two that made an impression or gave me a thought. The last quarter were truly meaningful, and felt more like fully formed stories or arguments writ in verse. So, let's give this thing three stars and I can continue ignoring poetry until I die.