love the adolescent reading habits link. And am building up to quite a long post about that top eleven most influential poems list. David, you are spot on about the academe vs beats split. But I'm more curious about how they defined 'influential'. Awful lot of good work out there to choose from.

My list of poets who most influenced me (probably only temporarily accurate) would include Bishop, Elliot, Pound, Moore, Rukeyser, Oppen, Berryman, Levis, Ferlingetti, (iPhone ate a couple here) Plath, Roethke, Ai, Szymborska, Achmatova, (sp), Koumanyaka, Transtromer, Heaney, and Charles Wright. Not all of those would make the popular cannon cut and several span the century, but there it is. What about you? What are yours?

Me personally? Eliot, GM Hopkins, Blake, Kathleen Jamie, Tennyson, Tony Harrison, John Donne, Wilfred Owen. Shakespeare, obviously.

oomg hopkins.

Love. With Carrion Comfort being the big love.

Didn't mean to sound like a blowhard, btw. Pedant, sure. But not bore.

But I'm more curious about how they defined 'influential'.

Sox, I think he was just looking to get a cross-section of poems that are commonly included in anthology for study.

He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon.

ah. frequency. Thanks Barb. I totally skipped to the list.

What?

American Poets? Errr.... much harder for me!

But from the list of poems I've taught so far this year: Elizabeth Bishop for sure! e.e. cummings. Would W. H. Auden count as American or British? Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Ron Koertge, Gwendolyn Brooks.

I even taught a Bukowski poem and I generally loathe him. Yet I think the poem is awesome and gets kids reading and writing.

Paging Steph! Have you read the second Skulduggery Pleasant book? I just ordered it and wanted to know what you thought.

Late to the party, but the adolescent reading list was really too, too funny. I'd love to see sci-fi and horror (as opposed to just fantasy - Dune aside) versions of those.

American poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emerson, Edgar Lee Masters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (at a certain age), Eugene Field (at a certain age)

Longfellow must have influenced me in some way, because I can reel off big chunks of "Paul Revere's Ride" and "Song of Hiawatha."

I'm a big English Lit loser, because I never got into poetry at all. I like some of it (Dickenson, Frost, Yeats, Shakespeare [of course!], and Poe, mostly), but otherwise, I'd rather read prose. It's a major shortcoming of mine, but I just can't get into deconstructing a poem.

You and me both, Kathy-- I respect poetry and there's some of it that really speaks to me, like Auden, for example, but for the most part, not my preferred reading. And I cannot in any way, get into novels written in verse. They make me twitch.