Poetry is not simply something you learn at school and forget a few months later. It can be fun, evocative, and exciting to read. Besides, quoting a few lines from a poem at a party will make people think you're terribly sophisticated!

　　托·斯·爱略特

　　"The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), is possibly one of the greatest poems ever written. It expresses a bleak¹ vision of a sterile² and corrupt³ modern world. This poem is one to read sitting in a dingy⁴ caf? on a dark and rainy night at  o'clock in the morning!

　　西尔维亚·普拉斯

　　Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is one of the most influential⁵ modern poets, yet her life was a short and unhappy one. She attempted suicide aged⁶ 21, and managed to kill herself ten years later by gassing. The death of her father when she was nine years old greatly influenced her life and poetry, as can be seen in poems like "Daddy,""Lady Lazarus," and "Ariel."

　　华莱士·史蒂文斯

　　Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a longer and less dramatic life: he was vice-president of a law firm for 21 years until his death in 1955, aged 75. He may have been a lawyer, but his poetry, which deals with the role of the creative imagination in the modern world, contains sensuous⁷, elaborate imagery. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is a good introduction to his work.

　　安德鲁·马维尔

　　Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was a Metaphysical poet who was also well known as a satirist⁸ and politician. "To his Coy Mistress" is a rather elaborate attempt by the speaker of the poem to persuade his "coy mistress" to sleep with him.

　　威·巴·叶芝

　　Nobel Laureate W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was widely considered to be the finest poet of his time. He was greatly interested in Irish history and the supernatural, and these are recurrent themes in his poems. Most critics think that the quality of Yeats' poetry improved as he got older. Try reading "The Lake Isle⁹ of Innisfree" (1893), and "Leda" and "Swan" (1928) to see if you agree.

　　谢默斯·希尼

　　Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939- ) won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and was awarded the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his translation of the epic¹⁰ Anglo-Saxon poem"Beowulf." His poetry is highly articulate, and has its roots in the physical, rural context of his childhood.

　　艾米莉·迪金森

　　While Heaney has been recognized in his lifetime, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of America's greatest poets, had only seven of her poems published while she was alive. Once a high-spirited and active young woman, she withdrew from society at the age of 30 and remained a recluse¹¹ for the rest of her life.

　　萨福

　　Although little is known about her life, it does seem that Sappho (650-590 BC) was well renowned¹² in her day. Two centuries after her death, Plato referred to her as the tenth Muse¹³. She taught her art to asgroupsof young women, and her poems are marked by exquisite¹⁴ beauty of diction, perfect simplicity¹⁵ of form, and intensity¹⁶ of emotion.

　　狄伦·托马斯

　　Someone for whom the emotional effect of words' sounds is as important as their literal sense is Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).A poem like "The Ballad¹⁷ of the Long-Legged Bait" shows his concern with vivid, sensual language. He was very much a man of the senses.

　　沃尔特·惠特曼

　　Walt Whitman's (1819-1892) poem "Song of Myself" also glorifies¹⁸ the body and senses. Whitman was forced to publish the collection that contained the poem at his own expense, but it has become one of the most important poems in American literature.