1. There is unfortunately a language barrier here. I know a lot of great Swedish poetry, but I don't know if any of it is translated (well). I can try to look up some stuff, but translating poetry is the most difficult translation work, if at all possible. I write poetry as well, and I managed to get a book published, a cooperation with an artist I know, half poems and half drawings. I've tried to translate my own work but it doesn't work. It relies too much on Swedish.

In English poems, I always return to The Second Coming. It's become like a refrain for me, and lines from it pop up in my head at the oddest of times. The same with Howl and America by Ginsberg, but those aren't short in any way ;)

Good luck with your own writing! I hope you don't get your heart ripped out and stomped on, but that seems to be mandatory.

Anyway, my Top 5 favorite short poems:

-"She Walks In Beauty" by Lord Byron

It's just such a perfect and potent poem...I really don't even know how else to describe it without going on and on about it, but just those opening lines alone...

-"Sonnet 30" by William Shakespeare

Yeah, you knew he'd be on the list...though if you've never read this one, check it out, it's my favorite of his sonnets, at this stage, anyway, I really like the topic and how he approaches it and resolves the matter in the end, I try and remember it when I feel down about someone...

"The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe

Enough said, moving on...

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" by T.S. Eliot

TWL and Prufrock are too long, and they're the two big works of Eliot's I love, but his shorter works are great, too, and this one's a great poem on memory and lives lived and all that...and the only redeemable thing that came out of "Cats"--not a fan of that musical, half for it being too pretentious for even me, and half for it mucking about with Eliot's poetry in an over-stylized and theatrical way--is that the song "Memory," which in fairness is a decent song by itself, brings some of the best lines in this poem to life.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats

I have a friend who's in love with Keats...and this poem, and it is a masterpiece, and the end line probably one of the most poignant and puzzling in all poetry, Eliot himself said it either ruined the poem to some extent or else he just couldn't get ...

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..."

@Vaft:

I hope there's a good translation out there somewhere...I don't know any Swedish poetry, or authors, really, I think (I know Ibsen, but he was Norwegian.)

And I don't expect to have it accepted so I don't think it'll be a heart-grinding moment when it's rejected...my friends liked it, but they're friends--

Enemies are truer than friends when it comes to critiquing what you write.

(So if maple shows up, he can truthfully tell me what utter tripe it is!) ;)

Oh crap...I got carried away trying to make that last sentence sound all alliterative with all the t's...

And now I definitely look like an idiot poser (at least more than usual) for using "tripe" and not being English. XD

Here is my own poetry in honor of all you bastards that got me addicted to Diplomacy and the subsequent drinking problems that has led to. =P

An Ottoman Alcoholic and Diplomacy:

The game's begun, I need a drink
A glass of wine I start to think
A Tuscan wine sounds good to me
So I'm off to conquer Italy.

That Sangiovese hit just the spot.
But quenched my thirst, I think not.
A nice Bandol from Provence.
So now I'm off to ransack France.

Now wine is good for most affairs
But too much gets me nasty stares
So ale will fill my tummy well
It's England next in line to fell.

I think it's time for something stronger
Though I'm not sure I'll last much longer
It's off to Oktoberfest I go
The Germans I must overthrow.

Beer then liquor makes you sicker
To that I just sit and snicker
Vodka shots, I'll take them straight
The Russians I will subjugate

To Austria I now must trek
One last country left to check
On invitation of the Duke
But wait, I think I have to puke.



With love, from Austria

My allies from both near and far
Please come to rescue me
Do I truly know who my allies are
In this game, Diplomacy?

For autumn past fair Italy
Was neither friend nor foe
But now their fleets are near my sea
To war? I do not know.

And Turkey, why ‘twas just last spring
In battle we did join
Quick death to Russia we did bring
And to them, brought their ruin.

Yet now both to my right and left
The Turks and Romans lie
I think unless I am quite deft
I shall be next to die.

"and the subsequent drinking problems that has led to" lol!

+1 for the poem, I'm guessing you wrote it yourself?

Yes... it was one of those rare moments of inspiration.

lol, that's awesome LG. Well done.

I agree about Grecian Urn, obi. Incredible poem, and incredible line. For the heck of it, though, I'll choose different ones. These are not ranked in any order, except that the first is my favorite:

1) "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray. Simply epic in every way. The best poem in English?

2) "Love and Age," by Thomas Love Peacock. Great at capturing the bittersweetness of passing time.

3) "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," by William Wordsworth. Beautiful and profound.

4) "A Channel Crossing," by Rupert Brooke. Hilarious.

5) "The Last Ride Together," by Robert Browning.

There are tons more I'd love to put but I'll show restraint. :-)

Most of it is pretentious nonsense....and most lover's of poetry I find simply like what they have been instructed to like by their professors...(eh hem...OBI...cough cough...) Nothing unique or insightful here...move along...move along...

Not as good as Lan's, which i love, but this was something i did a few years ago, just putting it up to try and encourage the trend :)

If lightning strikes
and our wives are weeping
while we are
forever sleeping
How will we hear death's bell toll?

When we fall down
to never rise
what will we see
With incorporeal eyes?

When we are dead
our bodies gone
is there a way
That we live on?

And when you know
where we go
is it too late
To tell your fate?

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Tyger by William Blake

Those are just some I enjoy, I don't have a top 5 though.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

- William Carlos Williams

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

http://www.artofeurope.com/blake/bla3.htm

Obi - you are going to publish your poem *here* first right?
C'mon - we deserve it!

The magazine won't consider anything that's been posted online before... :/

So, either I'll post it here when I get rejected...

Or if by some miracle I get it accepted...well, it'll be published and online anyway, then. ;)

The road not Taken by Robert Frost

OH!

Shoot, and I forgot, maybe my favorite of all!

"The Lady of Shallot" by Alfred Lord Tennyson!

"Ulysses" is fantastic, too, but this...this is just somehow a perfect poem of...of rhyme and themes and old and new...it has my pre-Shakespeare favorite subject, the Arthurian Legend...

This, Sonnet 30, and either Ode on a Grecian rn or She Walks in Beauty, Top 3! :D

A sweet and sad poem by Houseman. Appropriately, it's a war poem. Citing from memory:

I didn't lose my heart in the summer's even,
When roses to the moonlight burst apart.
When plumes were under foot and lead was flying,
In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.

I lost it to a soldier, a foeman,
A chap that didn't kill me, but he tried;
He took the saber straight and took it striking,
And laughed, and kissed his hand to me, and died.

If by Rudyard Kipling
Or
The True Gentlman by John Walter Wayland

If is a great one and i like Invictus.

Ancient.. I like yours better, far more profound than a silly dip ditty:)

"If" is a good poem indeed...even if Kipling likely was a fascist and racist...

Nachtgedanken - Heinrich Heine