“Little Gidding” (from Four Quartets), T.S. Eliot, 1942
Begins: Midwinter spring is its own season…
To settle on a single Eliot poem is an exercise in hopeless frustration, but “Gidding” is so demanding, and ultimately rewarding…so there it is.
“Puedo Escribir”, Pablo Neruda, 1924
Begins: Puedo escribir los versos mas triste esta noche…
From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda’s lovely and melancholically ambivalent meditation on lost love. (Translation here.)
“Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath, 1962
Begins: I have done it again…
Some may disdain the drama, but there’s no denying Plath’s mastery of word usage in her emotionally revolutionary poetry.
“Skunk Hour”, Robert Lowell, 1959
Begins: Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter…
The uneasiness inside a mind, by the archetype of the confessional poetry movement.
“Broken Dreams”, William Butler Yeats, 1919
Begins: There is grey in your hair…
Lyrical longing and remembrance as so inimitably expressed by Yeats, in another of several odes to his great muse, Maud Gonne.
I’ve enjoyed all of your 5 paradigms categories. I love to get recommendations from people and now I have several books, films, poets, musicians and artists to look into. Thanks for sharing!