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.

I do like Homer and Beowulf, as well as Chaucer, but those are more prose-poems than poetry, IMO.

ETA: Would you consider those as novels written in verse, Barb? I don't think I've ever seen a modern novel written in verse form--I shudder to think how that would read.

I remember how I suffered through my Renaissance lit class in college. Since we had to take Shakespeare as a separate class, we dealt with the other authors of the time, mostly Spenser's The Faerie Queen. Ugh, what a slog to get through that!

I love poetry. I think many people hate it because of how it's taught.

Lots of contemporary poetry is fantastic because you don't have to do the big giant lit crit on it.

In terms of novels written in verse, there are plenty for young adults, including Make Lemonade. Even my kids who hate poetry like the books because you forget that they are verse (most are free verse). They're great for reluctant readers because there is so much more white space!

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

LOVE!!!! More Tanith, which made me happy. Skulduggery is still SMOOV. My namesake kicks some ass. It's really good.

OOOH! Now I can't wait for the book to arrive. Tanith rocks. Does Ghastly become destatue-ified ?

Poets I consider influential: James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, John Berryman, A.R. Ammons, Marvin Bell, James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, maybe Charles Simic.