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STEPHEN’S “BOOKS THAT HAVE BEEN IMPORTANT TO ME”

(This list is meant to be suggestive and exhausting, but not exhaustive.)

REFERENCE FOR WRITERS

Frank Barron (ed), Creators on Creating: Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind. Introduction is a useful overview of recent creativity research.

William Rose Benet, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. Every writer and student of literature should own this volume.

Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer. One of the best how-to writer’s books. Help for writer’s block.

Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols.  More extensive than the Cooper listed below, though in the main I find the Cooper more immediately useful.  Excellent supplement.

The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers.

J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. Wonderful reference work, beautifully illustrated.

Ivor H. Evans, ed., Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. 

Wilfred Funk, Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories. [Out-of-print] Great fun for writers. Odd genesis of words. For instance, “villain” originally meant “farmer.” “Addle head” meant “urine-head.”

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist [the last is Out-of-print]   The Art of Fiction offers the most practical and useful advice on fiction of any book on the subject I’ve examined.  I suspect Gardner took just enough time out from his real writing to compose this necessary book, for ironically the writing itself in here is rather make-shift—but certainly the advice is not. 

Brewster Ghiselin, ed. The Creative Process. Explained in their own words by thirty-eight creators: Einstein, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Jung, Yeats, etc.

Teresa Ferster Glazier, The Least You Should Know about English Writing Skills.  A self-paced guide to grammar and punctuation, which is boring but utterly necessary for all writers to master.

Ian Hamilton, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry.  Much info on 20th-Century poets and poetry.

Patrick Hanks & Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of Surnames.  Expensive but the most extensive available (for naming your characters by meaning).

C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. One of the best handbooks available.

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (famous critical essay). His prefaces to his novels constitute an education in themselves for a writer.

Richard Jones (ed), Poetry East (lit mag), Origins: Poets on the Composition Process.

Alfred J. Kolatch, Dictionary of First Names (for naming your characters by meaning—for instance, in Equus, Peter Shaffer’s main characters are Martin (from “war”) and Alan (from “peace”)—do you get the sense he knew what he was doing . . . ?

Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, ed., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. [Out-of-print] Barth, Hawkes, Gardner, Barthelme, Coover, Morrison, etc.

Jack Myers and Michael Simms, The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. [Out-of-print]  Very fine section on line breaks.

Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work. [Out-of-print] Interviews with many major modern writers. Get whole series.  I think of this as the main reference work for learning your craft.  How writers really do it.  Invaluable. 

Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.  For character dialog, for what to generally avoid when you’re writing in your own voice, for creative use of clichés (they might purposefully be used as related image clusters, for instance - feather my nest, birds of a feather, bird-brained, etc.).  A frighteningly thorough work.

Ian Paterson, A Dictionary of Colour.  To supplement your thesaurus.

Susan K. Perry, Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity.  Based on interviews with the top poets and novelists, offers inspiration, motivation, insight into the creative process.

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 ways to turn a phrase.  This book is as entertaining as it is instructional.  I used this book in a class I taught at U.C.L.A. for writers wanting to make the transition from very very good to extraordinary. 

Miller Williams, Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms.  It’s fun to experiment in forms.  Prosody, particularly mastery of meter (hell, even just an elementary understanding of it) is what I find most bewilders most young poets.
 

ART

Van Gogh, Dear Theo. (letters) Almost as fine a writer as an artist.

Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.

Bernard Cooper, Truth Serum.  (Others also!)

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin.

Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!,” “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”  Among other things, a way of fine-tuning your own individuality.  What an extraordinary man!

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (one of the best literary biographies I’ve read).

Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway.  I find this the most insightful of the many biographies available. 

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory.  The autobiography as work of art.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years; Vladimir Nabokov:  The American Years

Vincent Cronin, Napoleon. [Out-of-print]

LITERARY CRITICISM

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism and The Mirror and the Lamp. Outstanding criticism on the philosophy of Romanticism in literature; complex; not for the faint-hearted.

Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawapha County, a novel-by-novel examination.

Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce (on James Joyce).  Absolutely delightful. 

John Ciardi, Dialogue with an Audience. [Out-of-print] Fine introduction to understanding poetry.  His straight-forward approach to explication is worth emulating.  The section on negative letters in response to his analysis of a Frost poem is particularly instructive and amusing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate.

Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return. On the migration of writers overseas during the 20’s.

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Superb criticism. Covers Moby-Dick.

Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex. [Out-of-print] A parody of literary critics. Very funny.

William Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries. [Out-of-print]  The best analysis of the man and the writing I’ve seen.

Fredrick J. Hoffman, William Faulkner.

Fredrick J. Hoffman, The 20’s. One of the most helpful books of literary criticism that I’ve read. Covers The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and others.  Hoffman is one of those rare critics to see the larger patterns.

Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (famous short story), “The Art of Fiction” (famous critical essay). His prefaces to his novels constitute an education in themselves for a writer.

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper. Social and literary philosophy. Influenced intellectuals of 20’s. Insidiously argued little book.

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. Champion of the Irrational. Calls Benjamin Franklin “a little snuff-colored man.” Poems of interest: “Tortoise Gallantry,” “The Elephant is Slow to Mate—” Kinnell is a great fan of his nature and animal poems as well.

F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance. Literary criticism.

Gifford, Siedmann, Ulysses Annotated. Comprehensive examination of the allusions in Joyce’s Ulysses (one volume also available for Dubliners by same editor).

Walter Sutton, Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice, Modern American Criticism. [Out-of-print] Hard going, but you come out of this book with a thorough introduction to the major schools of thought.

E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture. More intrinsically interesting than you might suspect.

Ronald Wallace, The Last Laugh:  Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel.  Wallace knows everything that has ever been written on the subject and brings it all together.  And if you think he’s only a theoretician of humor, you’ll find otherwise when you read his poetry.  I’m rather surprised that we’ve had so few major poets who let their sense of humor loose in the poetry—his is a big iridescent cross between a muscular canary and a tiger, which none-the-less can bite. 

Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, [Out-of-print] The Presocratics. Philosophy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures. Library of America edition.  Poetic transcendentalism.  Emerson was thumped in his time for being too universally positive. 

Stephen Jay Gouldy—anything. Very consistent. Don’t get too caught up with Punctuated Equilibrium, howevery—many of his colleagues dismiss it. 

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, etc. Poetic essays on biology, science and beyond by a very clear, likable writer.

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Esteemed Mexican author.  Scintillant poetic prose.

S. J. Perelman, “Dental or Mental, I Say It’s Spinach.” Comic writing. See collection The Most of S. J. Perelman. [Out-of-print]

FICTION

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.  One of the funniest books I’ve ever read. 

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio. Short stories.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room. Novel dealing with homosexuality. Black author.  Baldwin had an fluent, poetic style.

Nicholson Baker, Vox. Very very sexy, but highly articulate short novel.   I believe Baker said in an interview he had to type this whole novel with one hand.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot. Wonderful, witty book.  A must read. 

John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, [Out-of-print] especially “Night-Sea Journey” (the last is a short story from the point of view of a sperm). Highly experimental fiction which draws attention to itself as artifice.

Donald Barthelme, Great Days. [Out-of-print] Experimental writer.  A post-modern romp.

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. Complex short stories by an Argentine writer. A Universal History of Infamy. [Out-of-print] Novel. Borges: A Reader [Out-of-print] edited by Emir Monegal and Alastair Reid is a good general anthology. 

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Without a Hero. A collection of acidulous, biting, but very funny short stories.  “Hopes Rise” is one of my favorites.

Samuel Butler, Way of All Flesh.

Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar. Point-of-view control here is phenomenal. Seriously humorous.

Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger, “The Artist at Work” from the collection Exile and the Kingdom. French, humane, existential writer and philosopher.

Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland. Both annotated by Martin Gardner in one volume.

Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From. Minimalist writer famous for his short stories.

Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth. Masterfully sustained point-of-view with a moderately insane artistic protagonist.

John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother.” Poetic short story.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. The Heart of Darkness.

Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Other Descants [Out-of-print] (short stories as adult fairy tales), The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (Novel: Waugh should be read as symbolizing God, the game, Life. Pun on “J-Waugh.”) A Night at the Movies has only two stories I like—but they are incredible: “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” which is built out of ethnic clichés and the experimental “After Lazarus.”

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage. Impressionistic novel.  Ravel with a quill.  Pay attention to color and perspective here.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk.  Poetic prose for mystics.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, “The Bear.”  Necessary.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

          —William Goldhurst, F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries. [Out-of-print]

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Translated by Francis Steggmuller. Be sure to read Nabokov’s lecture on his work in Lectures on European Literature. Flaubert in Egypt was extracted from Flaubert’s journals by Steggmuller. Zesty reading! As are The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert was the consumate artist in everything he did.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India.

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theoron Ware. Novel by early American writer on problem of belief.

John Gardner, Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues.  Grendel is the Beowulf legend from the point of view of the monster.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger. Novel by Norwegian writer.

John Hawkes, Travesty and Death, Sleep and the Traveler. One of the best of our experimental writers, along with Gass, Coover and Barth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables.

Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, Siddhartha.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Complete Short Stories.

            —Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway(biography)

Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban.

Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (long short story—did James do anything tersely?)

James Joyce, Dubliners (short stories), Ulysses.

             —Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce

Franz Kafka, The Trial, Complete Stories, Amerika.

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird.

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City. Uses unusual second-person point-of-view.

Bernard Malamud, The Assistant. Jewish American writer.

Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Frull, Confidence Man; Doctor Faustus; The Magic Mountain. Nabokov calls Mann a ponderous fake. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, venerates him (see Creative Mythology for an analysis of The Magic Mountain). Slow-moving but powerful writing. Those with a good background in classical music should like Doctor Faustus. Confidence Man is essentially a metaphor for the artist.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, edited and annotated by Charles Fiedelson, Jr.  In my top ten. Cranky Nabokov loved Melville.

Toni Morrison, Beloved. Pulitzer-prize winning Black author. Wonderful poetic language.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (get the annotated edition), Bend Sinister; King, Queen, Knave; The Defense; Pale Fire; Invitation to a Beheading; Pnin. Lectures on Literature is excellent too. “Interviews” with Nabokov in Strong Opinions.  Really everything Nabokov ever wrote is brilliant.  Well, maybe with the exception of his poetry. 

            — Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (biography).

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. (Nabokov covers this work in his lectures.)

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.

Jean Paul Sarte, “The Wall” (existential short story)

Jane Smiley, Moo. Satire of academic life in a rural college, among other things.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Norton Critical Edition.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, “Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” One of our best writers.

John Updike, Problems. See title story.

Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, her collection of short stories. Very poetic prose. Can be very complex.
 

FILM

Frederico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini. Interviews with a very articulate film maker.

Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors (Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Hitchcock, etc.)

HISTORY

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers.

Vincent Cronin, Napoleon. [Out-of-print]

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 1-3.  Vol 4-6.  Really.

Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.

Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Great, even if you’re not a history buff. Tacit comparison of medieval times with our own. Wry, understated humor.

HUMOR

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.

John Barth, “Night Sea Journey” from Lost in the Funhouse.  A pondering of the meaning of life from a philosophical sperm as it travels to the ovum.

Billy Collins, Questions About Angels; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning. (poetry)

Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar. Point-of-view control phenomenal. Humorous, sad, profound.

Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex. [Out-of-print] A parody of literary critics. Very funny.

S. J. Perelman, “Dental or Mental, I Say It’s Spinach.” Comic writing. See collection The Most of S. J. Perelman. [Out-of-print]

Jane Smiley, Moo. Satire of academic life in a rural college, among other things.

MISCELLANEOUS NONFICTION

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia. Travel writing and fiction merged.

Henry Thoreau, Walden. One of my favorites. Poetic prose.

MYTHOLOGY

Thomas Bulfinch, Myths of Greece and Rome. Joseph Campbell introduces an excellent illustrated version, which includes great paintings and sculptures.

Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Masks of God (four volume set): Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Creative Mythology. The Power of Myth (interviews). Flight of the Wild Gander. [Out-of-print] Comparative mythology. All his works are good.

Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough. One-volume edition of social anthropology and myth, by a man whose work influenced T. S. Eliot.

Homer, The Odyssey. Fitzgerald translation.

Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Psychological Types, The Portable Jung, ed. by Joseph Campbell. Psychology. A bit on the mystical side, but quite astute on the human spirit and temperament—see his “Theory of the Types” in the Campbell volume.

Ovid, Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Roman mythology in poetry form.

PLAYS

Edward Albee, Zoo Story, American Dream, A Delicate Balance, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Jean Anouilh, Eurydice. [Out-of-print] Play based on myth.

Fernando Arrabal, Guernica and Other Plays. Includes The Labyrinth. Surreal plays by a celebrated Spanish playwright. In the last, “God” hangs out his dirty laundry, which forms an immense maze in which people lose themselves.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Absurdist playwright.

Chekhov, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard.

Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not for Burning. Play in verse. If the 1974 PBS production with Richard Chamberlain is ever rebroadcast, try to catch it.  The only version now available on video is the one with Kenneth Branagh, which I haven’t seen.

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck.

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros (play with people transforming themselves into animals). Amadee, or How to Get Rid of It. The Chairs.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, Incident at Vichy.

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Depressing and poetic play of a family’s fatal influence on one another. Naturalism at its best.

Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Harold Pinter, Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter, The Homecoming, No Man’s Land. English playwright.

Jean Paul Sarte, “The Wall” (existential short story), “No Exit” (existential play)

Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, etc.

William Shakespeare. Everything, of course. Get the Riverside or Harrison edition. Excellent annotations in both.

POETRY

Charles Baudelaire, “The Albatross.” Translation by Richard Wilbur is the best.  It appears in the New Directions edition of The Flowers of Evil, Edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, which contains numerous translators, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and  Stanley Kunitz being the best.  Richard Howard's translation of Les Fleurs du Mal won an American Book Award.

Marvin Bell, The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor:  The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. 2, Nightworks, A Marvin Bell Reader (“To Dorothy” is his signature poem.  Bell is one of our most important and protean poets.  His work is always original and vital.  In The Book of the Dead Man he fathered the Dead Man.  In Ardor he became his son.  In Nightworks, he finally killed the Dead Man, although the Dead Man has a way of turning up, even when he’s not here or there. 

(The Dead Man is pissed because he’s out of work, like a window that refuses to frame the glass, or a reflection that has walked away. The Dead Man feels abandoned, but isn’t that always the way?  The Dead Man has seen his heart turn to moss, but only on one side of the tree.  The Dead Man doesn’t know a spathe from a steeple, an anther from an antler. The Dead Man knows the elk’s horns abandon it too. It’s just he never expected it.)

William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose. Sample “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Clod and the Pebble,” “The Sick Rose,” “The Tyger,” “Ah! Sun-flower,” “The Garden of Love,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”—particularly “Proverbs of Hell.”

Marianne Boruch, Descendant. (An expert in metaphor.  Boruch should be much better known. All her books are good; this is just my favorite.)

Lucille Clifton, Book of Light, The Terrible Stories (Compassionate, humane, a wonderful teacher, a superb critic, an incomparable poet.)  Her poems have a directness that reminds me of Lucille herself.  But still, they’re foxy.   Sometimes, I feel, her poems are mis-read, or rather, not read carefully enough.  For instance, take a careful look at her King David poems.  I’ll see if she’s available to do a Critical based on one of them . . .)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bates. Criticism. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream.”

Billy Collins, Questions About Angels; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning.  Billy Collins is another major poet whose poems haven’t been properly appreciated for their catacomb depths.  The risk “accessible” (and popular) poets run is that they’re seen as only out for a lark, as apparantly innocent  a boy who has noosed a bee’s neck and takes it out “for a walk.”

Evan S. Connell, Points for a Compass Rose. Bizarre book in free verse. Incredibly erudite, but fascinating.

Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. “Black Tambourine,” “Chaplinesque,” “Royal Palm.”

e. e. cummings, “in Just—,” “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” “I like my body when it is with your,” “Humanity I love you,” “she being Brand,” “my sweet old etcetera,” “since feeling is first,” “if I have made,mylady,intricate,” “if there are any heavens my mother will, all by herself, have,” “my father moved through dooms of love,” “all ignorance toboggans into know,” “when serpents bargain for the right to squirm.”  I dislike, however, cummings’ sloppily Romantic and sentimental side . . . sometimes too simplistic a thinker.  A gingerbread man sucking on a lollypop, or, better, his shriveled cherry heart.  I do like his rebel side, however.

Peter Davison, The Poems of Peter Davison.  A poet whose work should be more widely known and appreciated.  Try “Literary Portraits” as your introduction to this humane, passionate and compassionate poet.  A Voice in the Mountain is my own personal favorite of his many books.  His non-fiction, especially The Fading Smile:  Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960, enriches our understanding of the poetry of our times.

Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Johnson. Most of these poems are superb. Also see Selected Letters.  Be warned:  there are many terrible editions of the poems available.  The trouble is that many editors have mucked about with Dickinson’s poetry, “improving it.”  Some adding bogus titles, some dropping lines, many altering punctuation and uncapitalizing Caps.  To complicate matters, sometimes Dickinson herself had alternative versions she sent in letters to friends, etc. etc.  Formerly, the definitive edition was Thomas H. Johnson’s, in particular the variorum edition (contains all variants, even the specious ones).  I’m told that the new ed. by W. Franklin is more authoritative but I haven’t seen it.  His variorum has the virtue of being more readily available than Johnson’s and has a few more poems.  List price on Amazon:  $130.00.  Run out now and get it!  For those on more of a shoe-string budget, a standard reading paperback edition by Franklin is available for $16.95 list.  Cheapskates!

John Donne, The Complete Poetry, ed. by J. Shawcross. 17th-century metaphysical poet. “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day,” “The Apparition,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “The Good-Morrow,” “Song,” “Twicknam Garden,” “The Extasie,” “The Funerall,” “Hymne to God My Body, in My Sicknesse” And so on. Fantastic metaphors.

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays. Try “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “La Figlia che Piange,” and “The Waste Land.”

Odysseus Elytis, The Little Mariner, trans. by Olga Broumas. Contemporary Greek poet.

Carolyn Forchè, Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us.

Robert Frost, “Birches,” “The Witch of Coos,” “Fire and Ice,” “Two Look at Two,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Not Taken.”

Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can’t Win:  And Other Poems.  Garrison hides away her art.  This is a brilliant debut.  I’m becoming more and more convinced that nobody—most reviewers, critics, editors, even high-ranking poets—knows how to properly read poetry.  This is a very sobering realization, with depressing implications.  Her poems have garnered acclaim, but without insight into their true nature.  It’s as if a violinst got applause for only how fast his fingers could move . . .

Frank Gaspar, The Holyoke, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, A Field Guide to the Heavens. Why has this man not won a Pulitzer for poetry already?  If you think you’re reading the best contemporary poets and you’re not reading Frank Gaspar, you’re not.

Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas, Without.  To start with.  Another on my short list for the National Book Award (for which he’s been nominated three times), the Pulitzer and Nobel.  Yes, yes, he’s won the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Edna St Vincent Millay Award, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award,   the Lenore Marshall Award (1987), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1988), the NBCC Award (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (1989), and the Frost Medal (1990).  But that’s not nearly enough.

Robert Hass, Human Wishes (sample his other books as well).  Absolutely excellent poet.  Referred to by Peter Davison as the “man who knows everything.”  And he does.

Seamus Heany, Poems: 1965-1975. The book North in this collection is my favorite: on the peat-bog mummies.

Anthony Hecht, Flight Among the Tombs.  A wry volume features Death as an inquisitor, an Oxford don, a Mexican revolutionary, a poet, and a whore, among other personalities. Start with this volume, then expore the more serious (and difficult) poetry in Collected Earlier Poems and Collected Later Poems.

George Herbert, The Temple. 17th-century religious poet. Try “The Altar,” “Redemption,” “Easter,” “Easter-Wings,” “Prayer,” “The Windows,” “Vertue,” “Man,” “Life,” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” and “Love.”

Edward Hirsch, On Love.  See in particular the title poem. 

Robinson Jeffers, Rock & Hawk (shorter poems selected by Robert Hass)

John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “To Autumn,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “When I Have Fears.” Complete edition edited by Jack Stillinger. Good paperback annotated edition by Douglas Bush: Selected Poems and Letters.

Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (my favorite, though Book of Nightmares is very highly esteemed).

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite.  This edition preserves all the poems Larkin wished to keep.  For a poet whose major subject was death, he was a very funny man.  His letters are astringent, honest, penetrating, stupid, opinionated, witty—but always artciulate and always worth reading.  Sample some poems:  “Winter,” “Reasons for Attendance,” “Next, Please,” “Wants,” “Maiden Name,” “Born Yesterday,” “Whatever Happened?,” “No Road,” “Wires,” “Church Going,” “Myxomatosis,” “Toads,” “Poetry of Departures,” “Triple Time,” “Spring,” “Deceptions,” “Love Songs in Age,” “Toads Revisited,” “Ambulances,” “Sunny Prestatyn,” “First Sight,” “Dockery and Son,” “Ignorance,” (I’m sorry I started typing these, there’s just so many), “An Arundel Tomb,”“The Trees,” “High Windows,” “The Old Fools” (yes!), “This Be The Verse,” “Annus Mirabilis,” “Vers de Société,” “Money,” “A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb,” and if nothing else, “Aubade.”

D. H. Lawrence, “Tortoise Gallantry,” “The Elephant is Slow to Mate—” As I noted somewhere else, Galway Kinnell loves his nature and animal poems.

Philip Levine, What Work Is, The Simple Truth (One of our best.  Anything of his is worth reading—I’m not about to make the same mistake of listing all I like, as I did with Larkin; I’d wear my fingerprints off.)

Robert Lowell, “To Delmore Schwartz”  And many others, of course.  Strangely, I remain rather cold to some of his longer, more famous poems.  I need to do more exploration now that the Collected Poems: Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter is out.  Every few years, I confront my own expectations and evaluations and experiment to see if they have changed.  (Maybe someday I’ll even like Henry James.  “Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.” —Mark Twain)

J. D. McClatchy, The Rest of the Way.  Anything he’s written.  His poems are carefully wrought.  Although he tends to wave off applause at readings, his basso profundo recitals are not to be missed.  Emotional asides on an English Horn.  Deep and intellectually satisfying as well.  But you have to give your full attention.  Othersize, as with proper appreciation of Haydn, you’ll miss the subtleties.  And the wit as well. 

Osip Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems.  Chosen and translated by James Greene.  A fine Russian poet who died in exile in Siberia.

Andrew Marvell, Andrew Marvell: Selected Poetry, ed. Frank Kermode. Or George de F. Lord’s Andrew Marvell: Complete Poetry. 17th-century poet. “To His Coy Mistress” “The Garden.” A good anthology of 17th century poetry is White’s Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose: Volume One: 1600-1660. Original spelling preserved.

James Merrill, Late Settings—“Think Tank,” “Revivals of Tristan.” Complete Poems.  I’m more captivated by his short works.  Sometimes, Merrill’s work seems like perfect little ice sculptures to me.  In the new Collected Poems, I believe, there’s an anecdote of someone reading a new manuscript poem of Merrill’s and complaining, “But there’s no emotion in it!”  Merrill slapped his forehead, went upstairs, and revised it in. 

Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems.  A poet of survival and joy. 

John Milton, “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” “Comus,” “Samson Agonistes,” Paradise Lost.

Ed Ochester, Allegheny, Changing the Name to Ochester.  Anything of his, really.  Searingly funny and honest poet.  A highly respected editor, but as a poet shamefully neglected.  I have no notion why he’s not recognized as one of our very best.

Sharon Olds, Anything. I like most of her work. Contemporary confessional poet, but a very private person.  One quote from her, live, that has had quite an effect on me:  “We poets write what other people want to say, but are afraid to say.”  Not a bad start for any poem . . . or poet for that matter.

Frank O’Hara, “Poem: The eager note on my door . . .” A very inventive, unusual modern poet. New York school.  Died when he was run over by the only jeep on a island.  He even had to insist on an original death.

Mary Oliver, anything. Very consistent contemporary nature poet. Lyric poetry with mystic harmonics.

Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems. “Blue Moles,” “Blue Notes from a Reedy Pond,” “Mushrooms,” “Candles,” “Morning Song,” “Tulips,” “Insomniac,” “Blackberrying,” “The Surgeon at 2 A.M.,” “Mirror,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Crossing the Water,” “Poppies in July,” “Daddy,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Mary’s Song,” “Winter Trees,” “Sheep in Fog,” “The Munich Mannequins” “Child,” “Words,” “Balloons,” many others.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe. Poems: “Alone,” and “Sonnet: To Science,” “The Bells,” “The Raven.” Stories: “Ligeia,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontaillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe should be read primarily as a symbolist and psychological writer rather than as a writer of the grotesque.

Donald Revell, New Dark Ages, Erasures, Beautiful Shirt, etc.  Difficult but damn good.  One of the best poets of the last quarter century.  Truly innovative.  His poems have the effect on me of not having a key signature. 

Kenneth Rexroth, his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry especially.  His Complete is available now in paperback.

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations. Translated by Louise Varese. Pure music.

Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos,” “Luke Havergal,” “Mr. Flood’s Party,” “The Sheaves.”

Percy Shelley, “When the Lamp is Shattered,” “The Question,” many others.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems. One of my favorite poets. Most of the poems are good, but often very complex. Keep your Oxford English Dictionary at hand; often obscure secondary meanings of words are activated. Main theme: relationship of imagination and reality, and the final fluctuating merging into the One of a Supreme Fiction. (“Domination of Black,” “The Metaphysician,” “Banal Sojourn,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Tea at the Plaza of Hoon,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock,” “Sunday Morning,” “Six Significant Landscapes,” “Bantams in Pine-woods,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Bird with the Coopery, Keen Claws,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Death of a Soldier,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Mozart, 1935,” “Botanist on Alp (No. 2),” “A Fading of the Sun,” “Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons,” “A Postcard from the Volcano,” “The Man on the Dump,” “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” “Asides on the Oboe,” “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” “Wild Ducks, People and Distances,” “Credences of Summer,” “The Plain Sense of Things,” “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” “Not ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.”

—Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens. Probably still the best short introduction to the work of this complex poet.

—Helen Hennessy Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems

Gerald Stern, This Time: New and Selected Poems (consistently good, odd, contemporary poet)

Mark Strand, The Continuous Life, Dark Harbor, Blizzard of One.  Fantastic imagination.  Consistantly surprising and interesting.  One of our most important living poets.

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems. (“The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “Out of the Sighs,” “If my Head Hurt a Hair’s Foot,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poet in October,” “The Hunchback in the Park,” “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” “Fern Hill,” “Poem on His Birthday.”

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems (New Directions). Very consistent.

James Wright, Above the River:  The Complete Poems.  Absolutely masterful. 

William Butler Yeats, The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Paperback: Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, edited, introduction by M. L. Rosenthal. Superb annotations. Yeats is one of our best. Very consistent, musical in his language. Sample at least: “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Valley of the Black Pig,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “Against Unworthy Praise,” “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” “A Drinking Song,” “To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine,” “These are the Clouds,” “Brown Penny,” “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” “Paudeen,” “The Three Hermits,” “To a Child Dancing in the Wind,” “The Cold Heaven,” “The Magi,” “A Coat,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Collar-Bone of a Hare,” “The Scholars,” “Lines Written in Dejection,” “A Thought from Propertius,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,” “Byzantium,” “Vacillation,” “Three Things,” “The Gyres,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “The Wild Old Wicked Man,” “The Statues,” “News for the Delphic Oracle,” “Long-Legged Fly,” “John Kinsella’s Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore,” “Why Should not Old Men be Mad?,” “The Statesman’s Holiday,” “Crazy Jane on the Mountain,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Under Ben Bulben.”
 

PHILOSOPHY

William Gass, On Being Blue. What does it mean? What does it matter? Philosophy and metaphors from one of our best poetic prose stylists.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford Philosophical Texts), A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford Philosophical Texts), Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford World’s Classics).  A thoroughly logical, thoroughly skeptical philosopher, with a very engaging sense of humor and humility.  He complained that his first book “fell still born from the press” and that he had looked forward to friendly and robust conversations with other philosophers, which was not to be, but he quickly reacquired his equanimity.  One of our most important—and likable!—logicians.  His whole opus has a consistency I find in no other philosopher.

Albert Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World. Hideously complex, but worth it. Levi certainly knows his literature . . .

Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.

Plato.  Anything where Socrates is Socrates and not Plato.  The account of Socrates’ death is particularly compelling.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Unpopular Essays, Why I Am Not a Christian, Portraits from Memory. Interesting, touching portrait of his brief friendship with D. H. Lawrence in the last.  He’s not been treated entirely benignly or fairly by contemporary biographers.  Reading his two volumes of letters is probably the best and closest and most convivial portrait of the man we may ever get.  His work on social and emotional issues generally has been less interesting and vital for me.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.

PSYCHOLOGY

Wendall Johnson, People in Quandaries. (Psychology from the viewpoint of a General Semanticist.)

Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Psychological Types, The Viking Portable Library Jung, ed. by Joseph Campbell. Psychology. Quite astute on the human spirit and temperament—see his “Theory of the Types” in the Campbell volume.

Susan K. Perry, Writing in Flow:  Keys to Enhanced Creativity.  Not just a presentation of theory, but a definitive practical guide to a state of mind that’s essential for most creators . . . and I’m not just saying this because I’ve slept with the author.

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses.  Particularly the last section on inspiration and creativity, “Courting the Muse,” which originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review as “O muse! you do make things difficult!”

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers.

J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, The Identity of Man. Passionate social, scientific and artistic philosophy.

Antonio R. Damasio, Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. 

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.  You’ll never think about the argument from design the same way.  Almost anything he writes is captivating.  The Selfish Gene is one of the most seminal and influential books of the 20th century.  In Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, he issues a fervent and heartfelt call for poets to restore more of the awe into science and reverse current clichéd prejudices.  In many of his lectures, Joseph Campbell makes the point that one of the main functions of myth is to cultivate a sense of awe for our universe.  And since the cosmological function of myth has now been taken over, legitimately by science . . .

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin. (Biography.)

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!,” “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and Time-Reversed Worlds. Physics. Fascinating.

Stephen Jay Gould – Anything.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  Who we are through our neurobiology. 

Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden. Fanciful scientific speculations. Very entertaining.  Sometimes more compelling for their imaginative rather than scientific aspects.  Most of Sagan is worth reading.  He was a formidable opponent of cranks and cultists.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, etc. Poetic essays on biology, science and beyond by a very clear, likable writer.  Two of my favorite essays on death, both surprisingly comforting, are “Death in the Open” from The Lives of a Cell and “On Natural Death” from The Medusa and the Snail.