Selected poems. I realize that this makes me a big cheeseball, but I love “The Second Coming.” It gives me chills every time I read it. I also know it by heart so I will probably be discussing it on the exam.

I like “Easter 1916″ and “Sailing to Byzantium” a lot, as well, but “Leda and the Swan” is just nightmarish and I am not going to talk about it on the exam lest I have a mid-exam panic attack caused by the thought of being raped by a giant bird.

Selected poems. When I said the other day that I don’t care for the romantics as poets, I should have made an exception for Wordsworth. The lyrical ballads and some of the sonnets are really beautiful, once again the type of poetry that works into your head without any conscious attempt at memorization.

But I really don’t want to talk about Wordsworth on my test.

Selected poems. This one could get me in trouble. A week ago I was still mixing up Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (who is not on our list, but who I studied a whole bunch in college). Today I am deciding that “The Idea of Order at Key West” is one of my foundational texts for the exam, simply because I can easily discuss it in connection with several other works that I know well. I am not sure I ever studied that poem in a class so I am kind of winging it here.

Fortunately it is one of those hauntingly beautiful poems with lines that you can’t help committing to memory even after only one or two readings. Those poems are my friends right now.

Selected Poems. I used to love T.S. Eliot. In the eighties, all undergraduate English majors loved T.S. Eliot. We were little J. Alfred Prufrock groupies. We were sure that if only we could understand “The Waste Land,” we would understand everything.

I think I must be too old for “The Waste Land,” because this time around I could not stop rolling my eyes and thing, “God, I get it, you’re brilliant, now shut up.” Which is not usually my reaction to literature. Usually I am pretty wowed by brilliance and I only want the stupid poets to shut up. Do you think perhaps I am approaching burnout? I think maybe I am.

Anyway, Eliot is also on that list of poets whom I am choosing to ignore. I am totally going to fail this exam.

Selected Poems. This one also falls under the too-much-poetry-this-week list, which is unfortunate because I used to really love John Donne. We got all of my least favorite poems (I am a weirdo, I like the holy sonnets best, and “The Flea” really grosses me out) and I have been uninspired to try to find any connections between Donne and the other works on the list. Since I have seen the exam format (although not the actual questions) and I know that it is all going to be intertextual analysis, and in all cases we will have a choice of texts to discuss, I am tossing John Donne on my literary discard pile. Thanks for everything.

Selected Poems. Unfortunately for Mr. Auden, I have read too much poetry in the last couple of days and I just can’t absorb anymore. My study group was unanimous on Auden: none of us had ever studied Auden in any class at the graduate or undergraduate level. Of the poems that are on our exam list, I liked “September 1, 1939″ the best. But I have nothing to say about it, and thus poor old Auden is going on the list of “things which will completely fuck me if for some reason I am forced to discuss them on the test.”

“Song of Myself.” I love you, Walt Whitman, you big freak. When I read this in high school I thought it was incredibly boring, and then when I read it in college I almost liked it but couldn’t quite, and thank God I reread it a couple of years ago or I might never have realized that I love Walt Whitman. That big freak.

Paradise Lost. Again, I only had to reread three chapters. I am amazed at how much of this I remember from college, but I guess it is not so surprising since my Milton class was my favorite class of all, except for maybe one of my constitutional law classes. I do not, however, recommend making your husband listen to the audiobook with you during a long road trip, because apparently most people don’t really dig the 17th-century epic poetry. Weird.

The Canterbury Tales. I only had to reread the general prologue and the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, but I skimmed some of the other major tales. I don’t have much to say about this except that I love the Wife of Bath, and I love Chaucer, and all modern translations are total crap. (I tried to speed up my rereading with a modern edition, but I couldn’t find one that didn’t suck.)

Selected Poems.

In my youth I sort of loved Tennyson, and at one point I knew all of “The Lady of Shalott” by heart. These days, I’m with Dorothy Parker:

Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he’s not like Tennyson.
I’d rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.

Selected Poems.

Huh.

I have nothing to say about Keats. I just cannot make myself care about the Romantics, not as poets, anyway. I am kind of generally interested in the philosophical background, but their poetry makes me want to cut my throat. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is okay, I guess, except to that whole “beauty is truth” thing I echo the professor who held the review session on this one last week: “What the fuck is that?”

Keats. Whatever.

Selected Poems. We only have to discuss a few of her poems and they are not particularly difficult ones:

“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,”
“I Heard a Fly Buzz”
“The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
“After a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes”
“I’ve Seen a Dying Eye”
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”

But this was the first time I’d even heard of a couple of those — “After a Great Pain” is not even included in my allegedly-complete poems — and I like these well enough. I confess that I’ve never really gotten Dickinson; she is the kind of tortured genius who makes me a little impatient, even though I know that is unfair given the distance I have from her particular circumstances. Once again, a half-hour review session made me wish I’d read more Dickinson in an academic setting, although I did read quite a bit of her work in college. The problem was that when I was an undergrad, everything was about meter and form and we never talked about what anything meant, and I have never been particularly interested in meter and form.

Selected Poems: “Digging,” “Act of Union,” “Personal Helicon,” “Bogland,” “The Tollund Man.” I have nothing to say about Heaney except that I hope that the line that goes something like, “As a child, they did not …” was constructed that badly on purpose. Jesus.