 | Poems and Prose (Poets) by Gerard Hopkins
Buy new: £5.83 / Used from: £0.01 A soft-spoken literary revolutionary. Profund faith and profound sadness.
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 | Lyrical Ballads: With a Few Other Poems (Penguin Classics: Poetry First Editions) by William Wordsworth
Buy used from: £0.55 The heart and soul of romanticism. Equal parts ecstatic love of nature and sympathy for the oppressed.
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 | Collected Poems 1909-62 by T.S. Eliot
Buy new: £7.76 / Used from: £2.86 To read this is to witness the development of a mind. Every word precisely weighed.
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 | Paradise Lost (Oxford World's Classics) by John Milton
Buy used from: £1.91 Shakespearean strength of language with the intensity of a religious/political visionary
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 | Collected Poems: Dylan Thomas (Everyman) by Dylan Thomas
Buy new: £4.99 / Used from: £2.98 Intoxicated by words, among other things.
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 | Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £1.65 Intense, terrifying, yet precisely observed and often witty.
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 | The Portable Dante (Viking Portable Library) by Dante Alighieri
Buy used from: £1.75 Up there with Shakespeare, obviously. Good translation that captures the directness of Dante's language and doesn't try to make it sound 'poetic'.
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 | William Shakespeare: Complete Poems by William Shakespeare
Buy used from: £0.26 Speaking of whom. Worth reading in their own right and not just as a supplement to the plays.
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 | The Odyssey (Perennial Classics) by Homer
Buy used from: £1.68 Best modern translation I've seen. This epic has to be read as we are all indebted to it.
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 | The Canterbury Tales (Everyman's Library (Paper)) by Geoffrey Chaucer
Buy used from: £0.01 No need for a translation of this - it's not as difficult as you probably think. A master elaborator of tales.
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 | The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear by Edward Lear
Buy new: £12.53 / Used from: £0.01 On a lighter note. Influenced everyone from T.S. Eliot to John Lennon
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 | Life Studies for the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Buy used from: £0.69 Showed the way forward for American poetry after WW2. Powerful and lucid
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 | Collected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics Poetry) by Patrick Kavanagh
Buy new: £7.66 / Used from: £4.97 A thwarted romantic with, occasionally, an acid tongue
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