The key to happiness is to read poetry every day of your life.
Poetry soothes the soul. It helps you understand pain, connects you to a pool of universal humanity, and nourishes every thought and feeling. Poetry is the perfect companion to love, lust, and loss. I couldn’t imagine a bedside table without a stack of poetry.
So, as a few people reached out to me for recommendations after I published ‘How To Read Poetry’, I decided to put together a list of the 10 books of poetry I treasure the most.
10 Books Of Poetry Every Literature Lover Will Treasure
Confining myself to ten was a frustrating necessity to keep this article short.
There’s no ranking here – just ten volumes that are currently doing it from me.
Ask me the same question in a couple of months and the list will look different. A year ago it would have been comprised of Armitage, Thomas, Rimbaud, Browning, and Blake.
Today it looks like this:
The Poetry Pharmacy – William Seighart (ed)
I love the concept behind this volume of poetry. It’s one I came up with many years ago. Speaking to a number of other bookworms, apparently I’m not the only one. So no wonder it hit the bestseller lists.
People love the idea of a poetry pharmacy – being prescribed a poem depending on your ailment.
- Suffering from anxiety, depression, or psychological scarring? This book offers up poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wendall Berry, and Izumi Shikibu.
- Feeling a lack of courage? Christopher Logue to the rescue.
- Dealing with insecurity, self-recrimination, or emotional repression? Your remedy is a beautiful trio of poems from Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, and Rumi.
Whether you’re struggling with unrequited love, worried about ageing parents, or in need of moral guidance, you will find a suitable poem to ameliorate your concerns.
Not only do you get a great poem, you also get an editorial about how to read the poem and about the nature of the ailment itself.
The power of this anthology is that it can easily turn someone who doesn’t know anything about the art into a lover of poetry. Or if you already read poetry frequently, it’s a wonderful anthology to dip into and can lead to new avenues to explore.
It’s also the perfect gift because as a physical object it’s gorgeous with some of the best paper I’ve seen ink printed on.
Check out The Poetry Pharmacy here.
Love Is A Dog From Hell – Charles Bukowski
I prefer Bukowski’s poems to his short stories and novels. It’s hard to explain how a set of the most vulgar, base, filthy poems I’ve ever read are also some of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read, but I’ll take a stab at it.
I believe I’m in love with Bukowski’s vulnerability.
Few poets are as revealing of their dark side and insecurities as Bukowski. The man clearly felt a great sense of loneliness, heartbreak, and desperation across most of his life, yet reading his poems makes me feel less alone.
Not only do Bukowski’s poems give me a sense of comfort and companionship, they also elicit some of the biggest belly laughs I’ve ever encountered from poems. In fact, his poems are the only ones I have laughed at. This volume in particular, Love Is A Dog From Hell, has me laughing and smiling and cringing every couple of pages.
These are poems you can devour.
You don’t have to be a deviant or degenerate to appreciate Bukowski, but it certainly helps. So make sure you stick a cigar in the corner of your mouth and hit the race tracks with a low class hooker and a bottle of cheap whiskey before diving into this volume.
Check out Love Is A Dog From Hell here.
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
Plath’s poems are the ones I struggle with the most. But they’re also the poems that reward the struggle the greatest.
The best advice when it comes to reading any kind of poetry is to make sure you’re re-reading. As Stephen Fry says, there’s great pleasure to be had in taking the same sonnet to bed with you every night for a week. But this advice is especially true with the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
I can’t say I’ve understood even a tenth of one of her poems, let alone assimilated any of its power, until I’ve read one at least five times through.
Plath speaks to the heartbroken, the downtrodden, the beautifully broken. And although she’s rightfully a poet for women first and foremost, I appreciate Plath endlessly as a man.
Check out Ariel here.
Selected Poems – Rumi
Rumi is the philosopher’s poet. And I mean philosopher in the most pure, most altruistic, practical yet comforting sense of the term.
These poems are a guidebook to love, loss, life.
Reading Rumi sparks the same enduring revelations about human nature as does reading Rilke and Gibran. If Marcus Aurelius wasn’t a roman emperor, but instead a wine-loving Afghan poet from the thirteenth-century you would have Rumi.
I rarely annotate poetry, despite being a lover of marginalia who dirties all of his pages of literature with copious ink, instead preferring to let it wash over me. But I annotate Rumi hard.
Forget the self-help section, pick up a volume of Rumi, and gaze deep into the waters of your soul.
Check out Rumi’s poems here.
The Poems of Wilfred Owen
There are a lot of great losses in the history of literature, but Wilfred Owen’s untimely death in the First World War is one I personally find the most profound.
I believe one of the greatest tools of literature is its ability to put our own lives in perspective. I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning every year in order to do precisely that. And I regularly read the poetry of Wilfred Owen in the same light.
I know of no other poet who has written of the horrors of war with such startling command of the English language.
Check out Wilfred Owen’s poems here.
The Iliad – Homer
I’m counting Homer as poetry, but his work is epic poetry.
I can’t appreciate the power of the language in the original Greek (yet), but Robert Fagles’ translation is a worthy substitute.
You’ll see The Iliad and The Odyssey on plenty of “greatest books” lists, but many shy away thinking they’re not smart enough to appreciate Homer or not having a Classics education would result in a dry reading experience. This is a shame because Homer delivers some of the most moving, vivid, colourful imaginative literature you will ever encounter.
Alexander the Great used to sleep with Homer underneath his pillow and used the epic writer’s tales of warring gods and feuding kings to guide his own leadership styles.
I don’t sleep with Homer under my pillow, but I do have The Iliad on my bedside table and I often feel as though I need to pinch myself while reading to make sure I’m still awake – such is the power of the great Greek’s writing.
Check out The Iliad here.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
There are thousands of wonderful love poems you could read, but you could also just feast yourself on Shakespeare’s sonnets alone and need no other input on this part of the human condition.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are a great desert island book of choice.
It doesn’t matter how many times you read one of the Bard’s sonnets, you will always find some new nuance that proves him to be a genius all over again.
I recommend the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (and any of the works of Shakespeare) because their annotations, introduction, and footnotes are unparalleled.
If you want to learn all the ways love can ache, you could do a lot worse than spend some time in Shakespeare’s company.
Check out Shakespeare’s Sonnets here.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
You’d be forgiven for thinking Emily Dickinson’s works to be the poetic equivalent of hors’ d’oeuvres.
They’re small. Compact. Prettily constructed.
But it’s a trick – Dickson’s poems are feasts in disguise.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cracked open the complete works with the expectations of gobbling up a few at a time, only to be confined to one two-stanza poem for the better part of half an hour.
Whole paradigm shifts in thought will crash around you when you read Dickinson.
Check out the poems of Emily Dickinson here.
Poem for the Day – Albery and Ratcliffe (ed)
I followed the Bradbury Trio for many years.
That means reading one poem, one short story, and one essay every single day.
The anthologies that were instrumental to me keeping up with such a rigorous reading program were the Poem for the Day series.
This is curation done well.
I’m suspicious of many anthologies of poetry because often they’re just thinly disguised money-grabs using works from the public domain and no thought, care, or consideration put into the actual selections.
This series is different. You can tell a lot of time and thought has been put into choosing a really eclectic series of poems for every day of the year. This is another anthology that makes a great gift.
Check out Poem for the Day here.
Selected Poems – Ted Hughes
I love the way Ted Hughes’ poems feel in my mouth. I love the rural imagery he is able to concoct. And I love the memories he dredges forth from my deepest unconscious.
For me, poetry is deeply personal. If I love a certain poem or author, there’s a strong chance that they come with memories and sepia-tinged nostalgia attached.
I can dip into any one of the poems from this collection put together by Simon Armitage and there’s a strong chance that a poem is connected to a vivid sense of person, place, and time.
For example, The Thought-Fox is a gorgeous poem that reminds me of my first year English tutor at Oxford and sitting in his warm study ensconced by a wall of books on a winter’s evening.
Check out the poems of Ted Hughes here.
Related: How Ted Hughes Writes A Poem (Video)
Bonus: Faber & Faber Poetry Diary
As a bonus, I couldn’t not recommend this wonderful diary.
It’s a weekly diary that rings in each new week with a poem. So you can read the same artfully chosen poem every day of each week.
The choices come from the Faber and Faber poetry line, kicked off by T. S. Eliot.
You could quite safely pick up any volume of poetry published by Faber and Faber and be confident in receiving a beautiful treat. But I recommend you check out this wonderfully presented diary.
Check out the Faber and Faber Poetry Diary here.
One more bonus: The Ode Less Traveled – Stephen Fry
You want another recommendation for poetry, you say? Oh, go on then. How could I resist?
The Ode Less Traveled is one of my favourite books of all time. It’s easily the one I’ve read most. It’s a guidebook to writing poetry, but in learning how to write poetry with the delightful Stephen Fry as your guide you will also learn to appreciate poetry more than you ever have done before.
Read this book before any of the others on this list if you’re a relative newcomer to poetry. I also recommend the Billy Collins Poetry MasterClass for beginners to the art form too.
Check out The Ode Less Traveled here.