Eleven Great Poems

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock With images of smoky October nights and foamy seascapes, T. S. Eliot explores a life without juice, the indecisive, actionless existence of a man whose life is too unheroic to be tragic.	My Papa's Waltz A great little set-piece with the immortal couplet: "My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself." I remember the beer on my father's breath with great fondness.	Mending Wall It's not fashionable to like Robert Frost these days, but this is just about my favorite poem about fences.
The Dance William Carlos Williams describes the Breughel painting so well that you know what it looks like without seeing it. I've included a link to the masterpiece anyway.	The End of the World Some say the world will end in fire; some say Frost. MacLeish has a totally different slant. The big top simply blows away before nothing, nothing, nothing at all.	Ozymandias Shelley's concise masterpiece about the vanity of earthly greatness. "The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Frost plays and wins a rhyming game with this one, yet not a line seems forced or out of place. Look for the playful rhyme scheme.		Epitaph It's what I want on my headstone, baby.
Complaint James Wright's take on a farmer's "lost hag" is, to my mind, one of the most powerful and affecting love poems in the English language. And since I don't know any other languages...	anyone lived in a pretty how town e. e. cummings strings together some nearly meaningless lines which manage to convey something you feel more than understand.	The Oxen If I ever get around to doing Eleven Great Christmas Poems, this one will head the list, I think. Until then...