TWEM Poetry Completed

I have finished the poetry section of the WEM as best as I could. I bailed The Canterbury Tales. I prefer  kids' versions, or maybe I was in a snobby mood when I was reading it. It really did not appeal to me.

I read Shakespeare's Sonnets but I guess I forgot to rate it on GR. I skipped C.S. Lewis' Psalms because I read the Psalms often, and I did not think I needed to read an interpreted version. However, I should have. It's C.S. Lewis!

Other than those, I read the rest and reviewed some, while others I wrote a review on my GoodReads group HERE. I did not want to continue through the rest of the suggested modernists because that was enough poetry for three years for me, and I am ready to start the plays.

Following is the reading list of poetry/poets in chronological order from The Well-Educated Mind, with corresponding links for reviews and a personal rating. I'm a tough critic.

POETRY

Unk: The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BC) ⭐⭐

Homer: The Iliad ⭐⭐ / The Odyssey (c. 800 BC) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Greek Lyricists (c. 600 BC) ⭐⭐⭐

Horace: Odes (65-8 BC) ⭐⭐

Unk: Beowulf (c. 1000) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alighieri: Inferno (1265-1321) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Unk: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1350) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (c. 1343-1400) [read 111 pages 💣] 

Shakespeare: Sonnets (1564-1616) 

John Donne (1572-1631) ⭐⭐

King James Bible: Psalms (1611) [skipped] 

Milton: Paradise Lost (1608-1674) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1757-1827) ⭐⭐⭐

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ⭐⭐⭐

John Keats (1795-1821) ⭐⭐

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1883) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1819-1892) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) ⭐⭐

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) ⭐⭐⭐

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) ⭐⭐⭐

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) ⭐⭐⭐

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Robert Frost (1874-1963) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) ⭐⭐⭐

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) ⭐⭐⭐

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) ⭐⭐⭐

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) ⭐⭐⭐

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

After the Modernists:

Philip Larkin

Allen Ginsberg

Sylvia Plath

Mark Strand

Adrienne Rich

Seamus Heaney

Robert Pinsky

Jane Kenyon

Rita Dove

The final section of TWEM reading challenge is plays. I will begin reading through the plays in chronological order as best as I can beginning in January of 2025. If all goes well, I should be done in 2.5 years. If anyone wants to see the list or join along, I started a Goodreads group HERE.