Statisticians will need to note that with two nominations, Under Milk Wood was the most chosen poem, yes, it's really a radio play but we don't let that worry us. With a further poem also listed, Dylan Thomas proved to be the joint most popular poet, with Larkin and Shakespeare also selected three times.
My list is, for these purposes,
Thom Gunn, My Sad
Captains
W.H. Auden, Musee des
Beaux Arts
Philip Larkin, At
Grass
Julia Copus, Stars
Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden
Sean O’Brien, Latinists
John Donne,
Elizabeth Bishop,
Shakespeare, Sonnet 57,
or possibly 129
57
Being your slave, what
should I do but tend
Upon the hours and
times of your desire.
129
Th’ expense of spirit
in a waste of shame
Is lust in action,
I decided not to have more than one poem by any poet or else it could well have been three Gunn and three Larkin before even looking elsewhere. I nominated Donne and Elizabeth Bishop for being who they are, for doing what they did the way they did it without picking a specific poem.
I read At Grass and, later, the Julia Copus. And there came the unexpected turn of events. Denise had said that she had chosen her poems because she likes poems that make her cry. And there's me thinking, 'fair enough but not me, it's more about words and language than emotion'. But then, a few lines from the end of Stars Moving Westwards, somehow becoming more magnificent than I had remembered, it dawned on me about grief and bereavement, and how this actually 'meant' so much more to me, perhaps hearing myself read it. And I had to stop and collect myself.
Maybe that's why irony, detachment and a degree of impersonality are so useful in poems. When you start to mean it- and I think Holden Caulfield arrives at a similar conclusion- it can begin to be a bit much. But I didn't think it would happen to me.
I have the lists that the PPS poets brought with them. Maybe I'll make a feature of them in due course. And if anybody wants to send me their 8 Desert Island Poems, I'll use those, too. Say a few words about how you chose them if you like. For example, John Dean knows so many poems by heart that there was no need for him to take those, he took eight more to learn.
