I don't read much poetry to be honest, except what gets posted here, but I do have a favourite poem. "If" by Rudyard Kipling. Although in the last line, he refers to the fact that if you can be/live in the way described throughout the rest of the poem, you'll be a man. I think it defines a way of being that transcends sexual differences. I would feel happy to be able to say I have lived my life by these 'guidelines' by the time I get to the end of my life. Just like Dialyns quote from Joseph Campbell, it has that ring of "of course, how right, why didn't I think of writing that?" So, what's your favourite poem, one that inspires or moves you, or whatever it is that lifts it up above all the other poems that you have come across? Shanna :-)

Too many to have just one favorite, but then I don't have any one favorite of anything. Whitman's Song to Myself is one favorite. Another classic, less winded one is When You are Old by Yeats. A more modern favorite is Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood. Same title as her book--very real and touching. Another favorite and better known poem is High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. A poem my father read to me when I was a kid. I think that is one of tjames favorites too.

I agree with Shoshanna about Kipling's "If" transcending gender lines. You feel like a better person just for having read it, too. There's no way I could choose just one favorite poem. I couldn't even choose a single favorite poet! But right now, Mary Oliver's "The Sunflowers" is the one I keep going back to and rereading throughout the day, like a touchstone of sorts. I like it because it encourages me to stop running around like a chicken with my head cut off and remember to just breathe and to appreciate the seemingly commonplace things and people around me who do "the long work/ of turning their lives/ into a celebration" although it "is not easy." So rarely does anyone bother to tell us that happiness comes through hard work instead of circumstances, that it really strikes me when it IS said. Lu

My first favorite (because I have so many) is and always has been "Invictus" by Earnest Henley. I committed it to memory when I was 14 years old and recite it to myself often. I believe poetry has some power like spells being cast. Invictus has gotten me through some tough times.