Poetry will save your life: a memoir [F ed.] 9781451693218, 9781451693201, 1451693214, 1451693206, 9781982104825, 1982104821

Table of contents :
Preface --
Discovery: "The road not taken" by Robert Frost --
Danger: "We real cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson --
Wonder: "The star" by Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor --
Selfhood: "My shadow" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "The swing" by Robert Louis Stevenson --
Memory: "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth --
Shame: "You and your whole race" by Langston Hughes, "I, too" by Langston Hughes --
Ancestors: Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd" --
War: "My child blossoms sadly" by Yehuda Amichai --
Prayer: "Have you prayed?" by Li-Young Lee --
Imagination: "The snow man" by Wallace Stevens --
Death: "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" by Robert Frost --
Poetry: "Ars poetica?" by Czeslaw Milosz --
Family: "January 1, 1965" by Joseph Brodsky, "Childhood" by Rainer Maria Rilke --
Fathers: "Those winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden --
Faith: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" by Emily Dickinson, "I'm nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson --
Foreboding: "My papa's waltz" by Theodore Roethke --
Depression: "Poppies in October" by Sylvia Plath --
Envy: Sonnet 29: "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" by William Shakespeare, "Confession" by Louise Gluck --
Sexuality: "The sisters of sexual treasure" by Sharon Olds --
Escape: "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar --
First love: "Bright star" by John Keats, "A blessing" by James Wright --
Mothers: "My mother's feet" by Stanley Plumly --
Friendship: "Taking the hands" by Robert Bly, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" by E.E. Cummings --
Passion: "The red coal" by Gerald Stern, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "The tropics in New York" by Claude McKay, "Heat" by Denis Johnson --
Legacy: "fury" by Lucille Clifton, "Diving into the wreck" by Adrienne Rich --
Marriage: "Song for the last act" by Louise Bogan --
Grief: "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, "One art" by Elizabeth Bishop --
Suicide: "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath, "Waking in the blue" by Robert Lowell --
Motherhood: "The pomegranate" by Eavan Boland, "On my first son" by Ben Jonson, "Funeral blues" by W.H. Auden, "Nick and the candlestick" by Sylvia Plath --
Terror: "Try to praise the mutilated world" by Adam Zagajewski --
Mortality: "The child is father to the man" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "My heart leaps up" by William Wordsworth --
Mystery: "Teachers" by W.S. Merwin, "Youth" by W.S. Merwin.