Thanks for watching, all! If you are interested in studying many of these poets with me and others, you can join my evening classes and friendly discussions at Patreon.com/CloseReadingPoetry
I'm Korean. It's nice to meet your channel while watching various videos to learn English. I'm just grateful that I'm watching good contents for free. I'll study hard with gratitude. Teacher! Have a nice day!!🪽🪽🩵
Your channel is a treasure trove Adam, so pleased to have been directed you way! This video is like listning to a long poem, performed with heartfelt dedication and enthusiasm! And knowing that Wilfred Owen made it amongst the 44 is just marvelous! Warm greetings from Norway.
I remember my high school teacher read "To a Mouse" with a perfect Scottish accent. He really brought out the humor of this poem! Thank you for sharing this Canon. I will have to go back and revisit some of these works.
Adam - this is a wonderful (and iron-clad) list. I have always said that Whitman is the most American of poets, and that Emily Dickinson is the most poetic of Americans. Thanks for posting this.
So much gratitude for you Adam! I thank you so much for your time and passion to share these things with us eternal literature students and poetry lovers. Hope something good always happens to you and to your acquaintances. And to all humankind of course.
Personally I think there are a few I will add to my canon - Henry Howard definitely deserves his place alongside (ahead of?) Thomas Wyatt in my book for refining the English sonnet. I do really enjoy this video for introducing me to/ reminding me of other poets in their context for my studies. So glad I found this channel! Thank you.
It shocks me that on a Foundations Canon list, there should be no place for such eminent poets as Lord Byron, Elizabeth&Robert Browing, and Thomas Hardy!
Helpful,in order to try to read through the labyrinthine mazes of Literature in English. Yet the more I try the less I seem to know,only a superficial layer of dim awareness,but trying I still do,with Hope as my Beacon.
Excellent video Adam. I'd been compiling my own list of poets - that started with Walter Raleigh and went up to Keats - that was going to be a project of mine next year so I'm glad your video helped add extra names to that list. I know I'm getting old when one of that list was alive when I was alive. Just.
1. Beowulf 2. Chaucer 3. John Skelton 4. Thomas Wyatt 5. Edmund Spencer 6. Walter Raleigh (God, no) 7. Philip Sidney 8. Robert Southwell 9. Christopher Marlowe (Yes!) 10. William Shakespeare (Thank, Will) 11. Samuel Daniel 12. Michael Drayton 13. Thomas Campion 14. John Donne (Yes! Not Dunn. Ever.) 15. Ben Johnson (Fantastic. I imagine him hanging with Irving) 16. Robert Herrick (Genius) 17. George Herbert 18. Thomas Carew 19. John Milton (Genius) 20. Andrew Marvel (Fantastic) 21. John Dryden 22. Alexander Pope 23. Thomas Gray (Lovely) 24. William Collins 25. William Blake (Absolutely thought provoking) 26. Robert Burns 27. William Wordsworth 28. Coleridge 29. Shelley 30. John Clare 31. Keats 32. Tennyson 33. Whitman 34. D.G. Rossetti 35. Emily Dickinson 36. Christina Rossetti (Just divine) 37. Gerard Manley Hopkins (Powerful) 38. A.E. Houseman (Hmm. No.) 39. Rudyard Kipling (No) 40. Yates (Yes) 41. Walter de la Mare (Didn’t he also write horror stories? Could be wrong.) 42. T.S. Eliot (Absolute genius) 43. Wilfred Owen (Fabulous and intense.) 44. Auden 44.
Hi Adam, thank you for taking the time out of your life to share your passion for poetry with the online world and for teaching those of us who have limited access to collegiate-level studies. As of now, my favorite poet is Rilke. He wrote my favorite collection of letters ("Letters To A Young Poet"). Excited to study works from other poets across time through your lectures. I studied English as a minor in my undergrad, but I'm only now starting to dip my toes in the deeper waters of poetry. I'm going through your Paradise Lost slow reading series and beginning my reading of Keats in my leisure time. You're making the experience of learning fun and enjoyable. Do you write/publish poetry of your own?
i very much agree with shelley's poetry as religious -- i've read both the hymn to intellectual beauty and the ode to the west wind in religious ceremonies.
Taking me back to my freshman Renaissance Poetry course and made me want to get a master's in that area! John Donne was my favorite...alas, I did not and went into magazine work! But now my teen boys had to read Beowulf and I tried to extoll the virtues of it...they're not buying it but will share that Gen Z translation with them! Anyway, love your lessons on UA-cam! I appreciated the Taylor Swift video where you compared Tears on my Guitar to the earliest lyrical poetry! Genius
This video is several weeks old now but I had a question I wanted to ask which is to an extent related to the video. Who are your favorite poets ever? This isn’t limited to a number, I’d like to know because you evidently have such a good grasp on this subject and I imagine that comes with good taste (if you don’t see this comment then that isn’t anything against you, this video is 4 weeks old now).
No Robert Browning and no Pound? Maybe a bit more post war would have been nice. I get that it's early to canonize some more recent literature but I believe Sylvia Plath has proven her staying power.
Also: I have a very true and sincere love in my heart for AE Housman, but it doesn't seem surprising to me that his good, but frankly rather sentimental poetry about athletes dying young would be overshadowed by the entire movement of Modernism emerging out of the very unsentimental horrors of WWI. As for the last poet, I don't think Auden ever wrote anything else as good as his elegy for Yeats (which is incredible) but I think his inclusion on this list is as much a function of his being fashionable during the period in which the selected anthologies were published as anything else. If you were to choose the last poet on direct literary influence alone, I think you could make a stronger case for Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost, and if it was for influence on the culture of post-war poetry at large I think Ezra Pound or Hilda Doolittle, for starters, would have stronger claims than Auden, due to their involvements in Des Imagistes and similar seminal post-war anthologies.
Can you do a canon of poets named "William"? Here's a start: 1. William Everson 2. Brother Antoninus 3. Will. i .am 4-5. William Carlos Williams (double counted) 6-44: ???
😅 6. William Shakespeare 7. William Wordsworth 8. W. Of Shoreham 9. William Langland 10. W. Dunbar 11. W. Stevenson 12. W. Baldwin 13. W. Kethe 14. W. Fowler 15. W. Gunnison 16. W. Alabaster 17. W. Alexander, earl of sterling 18. W. Drummond 19. W. Browne 20. W. Habington 21. W. Davenant 22. W. Cartwright 23. W. Chamberlains 24. W. Stroke 25. W. Wycherley 26. W. Walsh 27. W. King 28. W. Diaper 29. W. Broome 30. W. Oldest 31. W. Somerville 32. W. Shenstone 33. Whitehead 34. W. Collins 35. W. Hutton 36. W. Mason 37. W. Cowper 38. W. Falconer 39. W. Julius Mickle 40. W. Hayley 41. W. Jones 42. W. Newton 43. W. Brennan 44. W. Blake
@@closereadingpoetry It finally arrived. Its very good. My only complaint is his notes on the meaning of archaic words is a bit too sparse for the early poems, so it is hard to know meanings or pronounciations without looking up alot.
Ok, wait. Sir Walter Raleigh? Does this dude really need an apologia in 2024? Yeah, Raleigh's exploratory verse gives me a glimpse into how he was the f*cking worst, like at least Donne had the grace to become a priest in his later life. Is the reference to "Philomel becometh dumb" a reference to how Philomela had her tongue cut out and was transformed into a nightingale in order to stop her from reporting her r*pe at the hands of her brother-in-law? Because I don't really see much else in the reference, but please correct me if I missed something. I didn't find this myth any more palatable when John Crowe Ransom referenced it in the 50's or whenever, despite a million poems about nightingales standing in for poets. Are these "I got hella laid, but later babe, I'm off to explore" poems really exemplars of the moral purpose of poetry? Brother, we are both surprised by Raleigh's inclusion on the list of the best 44 poets. I really enjoyed the rest of this video, thanks! It made me want to read more Herrick and Herbert, especially, and presenting them all in chronological order helped me to keep them anchored in history, which I really appreciate. Also your enthusiasm for Pope and Gray is catching, I love it. (No offense, but you can keep Collins, and Skelton for that matter.)
I don’t agree with some of these being best. Raleigh is a great example. He sucked as writer but, unfortunately, was influential in his era and up through the Victorian era.)
Eliot among the top six and Frost not even in the 44. This is disappointing. Frost strikes right into the heart whereas Eliot's works seem preposterous.
@@closereadingpoetry Let me quote a critic more articulate than I. "Wordsworth is a veritable font of bad poetry - needless repetition, vacuous adjectives, pointless elaboration, redundancy, pretentious Miltonic inversions, metrical expediency, banal similes, non-sequiturs, double negatives, Latinate verbosity. You name it." poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/the-problem-with-wordsworths-prelude/
@@closereadingpoetry in the words of a critic more articulate than I "Wordsworth is a veritable font of bad poetry - needless repetition, vacuous adjectives, pointless elaboration, redundancy, pretentious Miltonic inversions, metrical expediency, banal similes, non-sequiturs, double negatives, Latinate verbosity. You name it."
@@closereadingpoetry a link for your edification from which I copied a quotation above poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/the-problem-with-wordsworths-prelude/
I'm astonished that someone so erudite would celebrate a poet so mundane quite simply so bad as Wordsworth. He offends me as much as Keats enthralls me.
We are all very fortunate that someone on the level of your refined, flawless tastes and supreme intellect has blessed us with their presence, while chiding our tastes and intellect at the same time. I'm sure I can speak for everyone when I say that we are in complete awe of you. We will make sure to consult you on who we are allowed to like or dislike going forward. Surely.
@@AdamTorkelsonyou speak for everyone? A little pretentious I might add. Maybe you're the literary guru your heavy handed childish sarcasm claims I am. BTW knowing that Wordsworth is a bad poet hardly requires a supreme literacy. It seems that attribution is reserved for the creator of this video whom I dared to contradict.
@mysticmouse7261 yes, because it surely can't be possible for anyone NOT to be in awe of such wisdom. And who can argue with such a well-thought-out argument as yours? All those supported statements you make such a convincing case with your rants and insults. You must be a card at parties.
@mysticmouse7261 seems to me the videos creator made perfectly clear the list was made through an objective method (number of appearances in anthologies), and indicated which poets on the list did not suit his own personal tastes (such as skelton). I didn't see him insulting anyone for liking them, however.
Thanks for watching, all! If you are interested in studying many of these poets with me and others, you can join my evening classes and friendly discussions at Patreon.com/CloseReadingPoetry
Thanks!
Wonderful - work(s) for a lifetime/
Presented with the joy that the experience of this list gives.
Thank you.
@Christophercurdo4384 thank you so very much for this support, Christopher! This helps me take my public humanities work further.
$500 !!! 😲
He literally did this
this is the richest amount I've ever seen in the comment section.
I'm Korean. It's nice to meet your channel while watching various videos to learn English. I'm just grateful that I'm watching good contents for free. I'll study hard with gratitude. Teacher! Have a nice day!!🪽🪽🩵
Your channel is a treasure trove Adam, so pleased to have been directed you way! This video is like listning to a long poem, performed with heartfelt dedication and enthusiasm! And knowing that Wilfred Owen made it amongst the 44 is just marvelous! Warm greetings from Norway.
I remember my high school teacher read "To a Mouse" with a perfect Scottish accent. He really brought out the humor of this poem! Thank you for sharing this Canon. I will have to go back and revisit some of these works.
I bet he did! That's a fun poem for the classroom.
Adam - this is a wonderful (and iron-clad) list. I have always said that Whitman is the most American of poets, and that Emily Dickinson is the most poetic of Americans. Thanks for posting this.
So much gratitude for you Adam! I thank you so much for your time and passion to share these things with us eternal literature students and poetry lovers. Hope something good always happens to you and to your acquaintances. And to all humankind of course.
Personally I think there are a few I will add to my canon - Henry Howard definitely deserves his place alongside (ahead of?) Thomas Wyatt in my book for refining the English sonnet. I do really enjoy this video for introducing me to/ reminding me of other poets in their context for my studies. So glad I found this channel! Thank you.
Sir, your Canon work is important and needed. Keep'em a commin!
glad to have found your channel, had become my new favorite in UA-cam keep up the good work
Adam, you are the best!
It shocks me that on a Foundations Canon list, there should be no place for such eminent poets as Lord Byron, Elizabeth&Robert Browing, and Thomas Hardy!
@purpledanny1958 yeah, unfortunately, E.B. Browning was largely neglected until the 1980s.
Loving your lectures, Adam. If Frances Thompson and Basil Bunting aren't on the list of 88 I shall be throwing my toys out of the pram! ;)
Helpful,in order to try to read through the labyrinthine mazes of Literature in English.
Yet the more I try the less I seem to know,only a superficial layer of dim awareness,but trying I still do,with Hope as my Beacon.
Excellent video Adam. I'd been compiling my own list of poets - that started with Walter Raleigh and went up to Keats - that was going to be a project of mine next year so I'm glad your video helped add extra names to that list. I know I'm getting old when one of that list was alive when I was alive. Just.
Excellent! Hah, I made the cut-off date for poets born after 1945.
1. Beowulf
2. Chaucer
3. John Skelton
4. Thomas Wyatt
5. Edmund Spencer
6. Walter Raleigh (God, no)
7. Philip Sidney
8. Robert Southwell
9. Christopher Marlowe (Yes!)
10. William Shakespeare (Thank, Will)
11. Samuel Daniel
12. Michael Drayton
13. Thomas Campion
14. John Donne (Yes! Not Dunn. Ever.)
15. Ben Johnson (Fantastic. I imagine him hanging with Irving)
16. Robert Herrick (Genius)
17. George Herbert
18. Thomas Carew
19. John Milton (Genius)
20. Andrew Marvel (Fantastic)
21. John Dryden
22. Alexander Pope
23. Thomas Gray (Lovely)
24. William Collins
25. William Blake (Absolutely thought provoking)
26. Robert Burns
27. William Wordsworth
28. Coleridge
29. Shelley
30. John Clare
31. Keats
32. Tennyson
33. Whitman
34. D.G. Rossetti
35. Emily Dickinson
36. Christina Rossetti (Just divine)
37. Gerard Manley Hopkins (Powerful)
38. A.E. Houseman (Hmm. No.)
39. Rudyard Kipling (No)
40. Yates (Yes)
41. Walter de la Mare (Didn’t he also write horror stories? Could be wrong.)
42. T.S. Eliot (Absolute genius)
43. Wilfred Owen (Fabulous and intense.)
44. Auden
44.
Kipling rocks
Good shit.
Hi Adam, thank you for taking the time out of your life to share your passion for poetry with the online world and for teaching those of us who have limited access to collegiate-level studies. As of now, my favorite poet is Rilke. He wrote my favorite collection of letters ("Letters To A Young Poet"). Excited to study works from other poets across time through your lectures.
I studied English as a minor in my undergrad, but I'm only now starting to dip my toes in the deeper waters of poetry. I'm going through your Paradise Lost slow reading series and beginning my reading of Keats in my leisure time. You're making the experience of learning fun and enjoyable. Do you write/publish poetry of your own?
Thanks for the lovely note!
I don't publish any poetry. Kind of you to ask though.
Mate, I love your stuff. 👍
i very much agree with shelley's poetry as religious -- i've read both the hymn to intellectual beauty and the ode to the west wind in religious ceremonies.
Taking me back to my freshman Renaissance Poetry course and made me want to get a master's in that area! John Donne was my favorite...alas, I did not and went into magazine work! But now my teen boys had to read Beowulf and I tried to extoll the virtues of it...they're not buying it but will share that Gen Z translation with them! Anyway, love your lessons on UA-cam! I appreciated the Taylor Swift video where you compared Tears on my Guitar to the earliest lyrical poetry! Genius
great insight into Blake, tyvm
This video is several weeks old now but I had a question I wanted to ask which is to an extent related to the video. Who are your favorite poets ever? This isn’t limited to a number, I’d like to know because you evidently have such a good grasp on this subject and I imagine that comes with good taste (if you don’t see this comment then that isn’t anything against you, this video is 4 weeks old now).
No Robert Browning and no Pound? Maybe a bit more post war would have been nice. I get that it's early to canonize some more recent literature but I believe Sylvia Plath has proven her staying power.
Thank you for sharing these amazing videos.
PS: I believe Carew is pronounced as /Ca-ree/
Very interesting 🎉
Also: I have a very true and sincere love in my heart for AE Housman, but it doesn't seem surprising to me that his good, but frankly rather sentimental poetry about athletes dying young would be overshadowed by the entire movement of Modernism emerging out of the very unsentimental horrors of WWI. As for the last poet, I don't think Auden ever wrote anything else as good as his elegy for Yeats (which is incredible) but I think his inclusion on this list is as much a function of his being fashionable during the period in which the selected anthologies were published as anything else. If you were to choose the last poet on direct literary influence alone, I think you could make a stronger case for Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost, and if it was for influence on the culture of post-war poetry at large I think Ezra Pound or Hilda Doolittle, for starters, would have stronger claims than Auden, due to their involvements in Des Imagistes and similar seminal post-war anthologies.
I agree with you about Stevens and Pound!
Can you do a canon of poets named "William"? Here's a start:
1. William Everson
2. Brother Antoninus
3. Will. i .am
4-5. William Carlos Williams (double counted)
6-44: ???
😅
6. William Shakespeare
7. William Wordsworth
8. W. Of Shoreham
9. William Langland
10. W. Dunbar
11. W. Stevenson
12. W. Baldwin
13. W. Kethe
14. W. Fowler
15. W. Gunnison
16. W. Alabaster
17. W. Alexander, earl of sterling
18. W. Drummond
19. W. Browne
20. W. Habington
21. W. Davenant
22. W. Cartwright
23. W. Chamberlains
24. W. Stroke
25. W. Wycherley
26. W. Walsh
27. W. King
28. W. Diaper
29. W. Broome
30. W. Oldest
31. W. Somerville
32. W. Shenstone
33. Whitehead
34. W. Collins
35. W. Hutton
36. W. Mason
37. W. Cowper
38. W. Falconer
39. W. Julius Mickle
40. W. Hayley
41. W. Jones
42. W. Newton
43. W. Brennan
44. W. Blake
@@closereadingpoetryOh... my... god... this is so beautiful.
Would be sweet if you added time stamps bro. I feel like content without them is obsolete
I know feel very poorly read. As a result now awaiting the arrival of Rick’s’ anthology.
I love that anthology. That's a good one!
@@closereadingpoetry I saw you recommend it in the video about the method for the canons. Looking forward to it.
@@closereadingpoetry It finally arrived. Its very good. My only complaint is his notes on the meaning of archaic words is a bit too sparse for the early poems, so it is hard to know meanings or pronounciations without looking up alot.
No Dylan Thomas I note who has been more influential to subsequent popular culture than Wilfred Owen or even Auden.
He's one of my favorites. Yes, unfortunate! He's on the Golden Canon, though!
Fascinating🌟 Thank you for this comprehensive teaching- i loved it. I appreciated the effort and time you put into this video. I was captivated 🩶
Ok, wait. Sir Walter Raleigh? Does this dude really need an apologia in 2024? Yeah, Raleigh's exploratory verse gives me a glimpse into how he was the f*cking worst, like at least Donne had the grace to become a priest in his later life. Is the reference to "Philomel becometh dumb" a reference to how Philomela had her tongue cut out and was transformed into a nightingale in order to stop her from reporting her r*pe at the hands of her brother-in-law? Because I don't really see much else in the reference, but please correct me if I missed something. I didn't find this myth any more palatable when John Crowe Ransom referenced it in the 50's or whenever, despite a million poems about nightingales standing in for poets. Are these "I got hella laid, but later babe, I'm off to explore" poems really exemplars of the moral purpose of poetry? Brother, we are both surprised by Raleigh's inclusion on the list of the best 44 poets.
I really enjoyed the rest of this video, thanks! It made me want to read more Herrick and Herbert, especially, and presenting them all in chronological order helped me to keep them anchored in history, which I really appreciate. Also your enthusiasm for Pope and Gray is catching, I love it. (No offense, but you can keep Collins, and Skelton for that matter.)
No Black or non-Anglo American poets. Very few women. Hope you study them!
I don’t know much about either poet but does anybody else see similarities between John Skelton and Gerard Manley Hopkins?
@SerWhiskeyfeet oh, interesting. Especially his "Spring and Fall"
I don’t agree with some of these being best. Raleigh is a great example. He sucked as writer but, unfortunately, was influential in his era and up through the Victorian era.)
Eliot among the top six and Frost not even in the 44. This is disappointing. Frost strikes right into the heart whereas Eliot's works seem preposterous.
I find Frost vastly overrated, although occasionally interesting)
A rather foolish endeavor, it seems to me. “Heroism”? But who cares, your narration delivers one charm after another. The heart is high.
Dear brother. I recommend you , please Read the Holly Quran.
Wordsworth is a bad poet, objectively speaking.
Hahahahaha sounds good bud
I am genuinely interested in hearing your reasons that support this claim! @mysticmous7261
@@closereadingpoetry Let me quote a critic more articulate than I.
"Wordsworth is a veritable font of bad poetry - needless repetition, vacuous adjectives, pointless elaboration, redundancy, pretentious Miltonic inversions, metrical expediency, banal similes, non-sequiturs, double negatives, Latinate verbosity. You name it."
poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/the-problem-with-wordsworths-prelude/
@@closereadingpoetry in the words of a critic more articulate than I
"Wordsworth is a veritable font of bad poetry - needless repetition, vacuous adjectives, pointless elaboration, redundancy, pretentious Miltonic inversions, metrical expediency, banal similes, non-sequiturs, double negatives, Latinate verbosity. You name it."
@@closereadingpoetry a link for your edification from which I copied a quotation above
poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/the-problem-with-wordsworths-prelude/
I'm astonished that someone so erudite would celebrate a poet so mundane quite simply so bad as Wordsworth. He offends me as much as Keats enthralls me.
We are all very fortunate that someone on the level of your refined, flawless tastes and supreme intellect has blessed us with their presence, while chiding our tastes and intellect at the same time. I'm sure I can speak for everyone when I say that we are in complete awe of you. We will make sure to consult you on who we are allowed to like or dislike going forward. Surely.
@@AdamTorkelsonyou speak for everyone? A little pretentious I might add. Maybe you're the literary guru your heavy handed childish sarcasm claims I am. BTW knowing that Wordsworth is a bad poet hardly requires a supreme literacy. It seems that attribution is reserved for the creator of this video whom I dared to contradict.
@mysticmouse7261 yes, because it surely can't be possible for anyone NOT to be in awe of such wisdom. And who can argue with such a well-thought-out argument as yours? All those supported statements you make such a convincing case with your rants and insults. You must be a card at parties.
@@AdamTorkelsonIf you say so. All must capitulate apparently to your superior wisdom or at least that of the video's creator.
@mysticmouse7261 seems to me the videos creator made perfectly clear the list was made through an objective method (number of appearances in anthologies), and indicated which poets on the list did not suit his own personal tastes (such as skelton). I didn't see him insulting anyone for liking them, however.