I have been very much enjoying learning about poetry from Billy Collins and his MasterClass, Billy Collins Teaches Reading and Writing Poetry.
I want to read through the poets and poems he references, so I am saving this as a checklist for later.
Links point to public poem pages when I could find one. For the two student workshop poems, I linked the MasterClass lesson pages because I could not find public full-text pages outside the course.
Core poems used or discussed
- Billy Collins - “Elk River Falls”
- Walt Whitman - “To a Locomotive in Winter”
- Billy Collins - “Grand Central”
- Robert Frost - “The Road Not Taken”
- Hart Crane - “To Brooklyn Bridge”
- Billy Collins - “Introduction to Poetry”
- Emily Dickinson - “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
- William Shakespeare - “Sonnet 73”
- Walt Whitman - “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
- Billy Collins - “Questions About Angels”
- Louis Jenkins - “Baloney”
- Richard Jones - “Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed”
- Billy Collins - “Monday”
- Charles Bukowski - “8 Count”
- Marie Howe - “What the Living Do”
- Billy Collins - “The Death of the Hat”
- Philip Larkin - “The Mower”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison”
- Ruth L. Schwartz - “The Swan at Edgewater Park”
- W. B. Yeats - “The Wild Swans at Coole”
- Sarah Iqbal - “My (Muslim) Father Seizes the Thing on My Nightstand”
- Paul Epland - “The Crash”
- John Donne - “To His Mistress Going to Bed”
Additional poems and influence references
- Robert Frost - “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
- Robert Hayden - “Those Winter Sundays”
- Billy Collins - She Was Just Seventeen
- Billy Collins - “The Lanyard”
- Billy Collins - “Picnic, Lightning”
- Billy Collins - “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’”
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti - “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes”
- Wallace Stevens - “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
- Charles Simic - “Bestiary for the Fingers on My Right Hand”
- Richard Hugo - The Triggering Town
- Thom Gunn - The Sense of Movement
Related books, collections, and essays
- Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost’s Poems
- Louis Jenkins - North of the Cities
- Hart Crane - The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
- David Lehman, editor - The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
- David Orr - “The Most Misread Poem in America”
- Allen Ginsberg - The Essential Ginsberg
- Marie Howe - Magdalene: Poems
- Gregory Corso - Mindfield: New and Selected Poems
- Susan Howe - My Emily Dickinson
- Ruth L. Schwartz - Accordion Breathing and Dancing
- Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Emily Dickinson - Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them
- Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, editors - Seriously Funny
- Stephen Dobyns - Best Words, Best Order
- Wallace Stevens - The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
- Charles Simic - Dismantling the Silence
- Philip Larkin - Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Coney Island of the Mind
- Michael Adams - In Praise of Profanity
A good first pass might be Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73”, Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do”, and Larkin’s “The Mower”.