The 10 best American poems
The list could go on and on, but these are the poems that seem to me to have left the deepest mark on US literature – and me 1 mail Engraving of Walt Whitman by George C Cox. Image: Bettmann/Corbis For whatever reason, I woke up today with a list of the 10 greatest American poems in my head that had been accumulating through the night. Every list is subjective, and of course the use of "greatest" even more so - but these are not just "favorite" poems. I've been thinking about American poetry - and teaching it to university students - for nearly 40 years, and these are the 10 poems that, in my own reading life, have seemed the most durable; poems that shifted the course of poetry in the United States, as well as poems that I look forward to teaching every year because they represent something indelible. The list could go on and on, of course. I deeply regret leaving off Roethke's "The Lost Son", Adrienne Rich's "