Top 20 Favourite Poems since 1900 became the subject, and in English sort of goes without saying but wasn't said.
So, not being able to resist a list, here's mine, off the top of my head, and it could of course have been considerably different done at any other time,
Thom Gunn – Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-sad-captains/
, Touch.
Philip Larkin – Church Going, At Grass.
Seamus Heaney – A Brigid’s Girdle.
Sean O’Brien –Latinists
W.H. Auden – Musee des Beaux Arts.
Paul Muldoon – Incantata, http://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/paul-muldoon-incantata.html
(a vast thing- I can’t explain it much- but probably the greatest poem of the
last few decades)
Sylvia Plath- Spinster
Derek Mahon- Courtyards in Delft
Roddy Lumsden- An Older Woman http://www.ninblak.demon.co.uk/vit-p/booklove/older.htm
Alun Lewis – Corfe
Castle
Carol Ann Duffy – Mrs. Midas
Tony Harrison – Loving Memory (I did have to look up the
title of that)
Richard Wilbur – Transit
T.S. Eliot – The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
August Kleinzahler – Snow in North
Jersey
Ted Hughes – October Dawn
W. B. Yeats - Byzantium