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Home , Robert Hayden, William Stafford (poet)

MODERN AMERICAN POETRY Table of Contents

A NOTE TO THE READER (1874–1963) HOW TO READ A POEM Mowing ABOUT SHARED INQUIRY The Telephone The Hill Wife (1819–1892) “Out, Out—” Song of Myself (1-3) Acquainted with the Night To a Stranger Desert Places We Two Boys Together Clinging The Subverted Flower Salut Au Monde! (1-5) Willful Homing There Was a Child Went Forth To a Locomotive in Winter Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) From the Misery of Don Joost (1830–1886) Anecdote of the Jar [I taste a liquor never brewed] Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. [I’m Nobody! Who are you?] Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs [I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,] Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird [This World is not conclusion] How to Live. What to Do [The Soul selects her own Society] The Idea of Order at Key West [I died for Beauty - but was scarce ] The Poems of Our Climate [I heard a Fly buzz - when I died-] Study of Two Pears [Undue Significance a starving man attaches] Of Mere Being [Perception of an Object costs] (1883–1963) Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) To Waken an Old Lady “Butch” Weldy The Young Housewife Petit, the Poet Queen Anne’s Lace Anne Rutledge The Widow’s Lament in Springtime Lucinda Matlock The Great Figure Spring and All Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) This Is Just to Say Luke Havergal The Last Words of My English Grandmother Richard Cory Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Miniver Cheevy The Descent The Dark Hills From Spring and All Mr. Flood’s Party Why He Was There H. D. (1886–1961) The Helmsman Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906) Lethe The Poet and His Song Chance A Summer’s Night Fragment 113 We Wear the Mask Leda When Dey ’Listed Colored Soldiers The Unsung Heroes T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) (1911–1979) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Chemin de Fer Preludes The Fish Rhapsody on a Windy Night Insomnia Aunt Helen Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore The Hollow Men Sestina Sandpiper E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) North Haven FROM Five Americans [because it’s / Spring] (1913–1980) [a great / man] Belsen, Day of Liberation [who are you,little i] Those Winter Sundays [Buffalo Bill ’s / defunct] For a Young Artist [if there are any heavens my mother will The Islands (all by herself) have] [somewhere i have never travelled, gladly (1914–1965) beyond] 90 North [at dusk / just when] The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner [I(a / le / af] When I Was Home Last Christmas ... The Woman at the Washington Zoo Hart Crane (1899–1932) The Player Piano Legend My Grandmother’s Love Letters (1914–1993) Garden Abstract Traveling Through the Dark Chaplinesque Why I Am a Poet Recitative What Gets Away Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing (1902–1967) American Gothic The Negro Speaks of Rivers I, Too (1917–2000) The Weary Blues the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon Railroad Avenue the sonnet-ballad Harlem Night We Real Cool Theme for English B To Black Women Harlem [2] Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) The Lovers Child on Top of a Greenhouse A Woman Meets an Old Lover I Knew a Woman Wedding-Ring The Voice Mid-American Tragedy The Waking The Batterers A Walk in Late Summer In Evening Air John Logan (1923–1987) The Sequel Lines on His Birthday Poem, Slow to Come, on the Death of Cummings Poem for My Brother Believe It

Donald Justice (1925–) For Grace, After a Party Time and the Weather To My Dead Father Men at Forty Interior (With Jane) The Tourist from Syracuse Autobiographia Literaria The Telephone Number of the Muse Poem James Wright (1927–1980) The Missing Person Saint Judas Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1925–) Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm Morning Swim in Pine Island, Minnesota After Love Beginning Living Alone with Jesus Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage The Longing to Be Saved of the Moon: Christmas, 1960 How It Is A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place

Robert Bly (1926–) (1928–) Three Presidents My Son My Executioner After Long Busyness Digging The Dead Seal The Man in the Dead Machine In Rainy September Woolworth’s Why We Don’t Die Maple Syrup Things To Think Kicking the Leaves

Robert Creeley (1926–) Anne Sexton (1928–) The Innocence Her Kind I Know a Man With Mercy for the Greedy The Rain Housewife The Language Just Once Arroyo The Ambition Bird This Day Self-Portrait Adrienne Rich (1929–) If Happiness Living in Sin Oh Max Villa Adriana FROM The Blue Ghazals Allen Ginsberg (1926–1977) Diving into the Wreck FROM Kaddish FROM Twenty-One Love Poems Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Homage to Winter Letters Now and Forever Gary Snyder (1930–) Homeless Compleynt Above Pate Valley Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina Goofing Again Riprap Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) Marin-An Why I Am Not a Painter I Went into the Maverick Bar A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Axe Handles Fire Island As for Poets The Day Lady Died Pearl Harbor

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) Linda Hogan (1947–) The Colossus Nothing Mirror Two of Hearts Lady Lazarus Two Sheep in Fog The New Apartment: Minneapolis Edge Celebration: Birth of a Colt

Mark Strand (1934–) Ray Young Bear (1950–) Keeping Things Whole From the Spotted Night Eating Poetry Wadasa Nakamoon, Vietnam Memorial For Jessica, My Daughter Our Bird Aegis The Continuous Life The Mask of Four Indistinguishable Thunderstorms The End The Night, The Porch (1952–) Testimonial Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) Rosa Oranges Teach Us to Number Our Days Death is a Beautiful Car Parked Only Gospel A Baseball Game, Part 7 The Sidney Greenstreet Blues (1952–) Minnows Marge Piercy (1936–) My Father and the Figtree For the young who want to You Know Who You Are Sign What People Do The skyscrapers of the financial district Blood dance with Gasman How Palestinians Keep Warm September afternoon at four o’clock Barbie doll (1952–) Moving Away Michael S. Harper (1938–) TV in Black and White Letter to a Moon Child Black Hair Black Study Behind Grandma’s House The Dance of the Elephants College Car We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper Jane Hirshfield (1953–) If You Don’t Force It For What Binds Us Release: Kind of Blue Pomegranates The Love of Aged Horses Yusef Komunykau (1947–) The Weighing Out There There Be Dragons Not Moving Even One Step Strands Standing Deer Untitled Blues Hope and Love Villon/ Leadbelly Mathematics The Music That Hurts Birds on a Powerline

Martín Espada (1957–) Bully Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits The Lover of a Subversive Is also a Subversive Fidel in Ohio Tires Stacked in the Hallways of Civilization Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper The Music of Astronomy

Li-Young Lee (1957–) The Gift Early in the Morning Eating Alone Eating Together This Room and Everything in It This Hour and What Is Dead

Gerry Crinnin (1958–) Nocturne Final Exam Common Grave Walking Through Glass

A NOTE ON METER GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS