JJ's Favorite Poems

Reading and enjoying poetry is a highly individual experience; these are poems that gripped me the first time I read them and have refused to let me go.

Broken Hearts

• Anna Akhmatova, You Thought I Was That Type

Cynicism and Suffering

• William Blake, London
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The World is a Beautiful Place

Everyday Life

• Carl Sandburg, Fog
• William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

Everyday People

• Eavan Boland, The Emigrant Irish
• Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
• Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Healing and Recovery

• Anna Akhmatova, The Sentence
• Emily Dickinson, After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes
  

Life Lessons

• Robert Frost The Road Not Taken
• Langston Hughes, Mother to Son
• Langston Hughes, Dreams
• Rudyard Kipling, If

A Lifetime of Love

• Jarold Ramsey, The Talley Stick

Love and Intimacy and Sex (Man's POV)

• Anonymous, My Love in Her Attire Doth Show Her Wit
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty
• John Donne, To His Mistress Going to Bed
• Robert Herrick, Upon Julia's Clothes
• Theodore Roethke, I Knew a Woman
• William Wordsworth, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

Love and Intimacy and Sex (Woman's POV)

• Margaret Atwood, Variations on the Word "Sleep"
• Carol Jane Bangs, Touching Each Other's Surfaces
• Audre Lorde, Recreation
• Marge Piercy, You Ask Why Sometimes I Say Stop
  
• Adrienne Rich, Two Songs
• Diane Wakoski, Uneasy Rider

Nature

• Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Sacred

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Holy Longing
• George Herbert, The Altar
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Social Issues

• Margaret Walker, For My People