21 of the best poetry books of all time
What exactly constitutes a poem?
To some contemporary writers, one might consider a shopping list of milk, eggs, oats and tea a form of poetry. Classicists will look towards narrative epics by the likes of Homer, Virgil and Dante, while modern critics may focus solely on 20th and 21st-century works by zeitgeist-shifting authors and creators of new poetic genres.
In A Little History of Poetry, renowned academic and expert on the subject John Carey puts it succinctly, “If music is sound organised in a particular way, poetry is a way of organising language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued.” Yet value is subjective, which means that the extent to which individuals will remember certain rhymes differs from one person to the next.
Allen Ginsburg saw poetry as an act of exposure, “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public”. Robert Frost had a similarly liberating idea of poetry, and he saw the medium as “[…] the renewal of words, setting them free, and that’s what
