The Top 25 Poetry Books of the Century According to Mischa Willett

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By Dr. Mischa Willett

I love recommendation lists. There’s something about totting up and taking stock that feels like making order from chaos, an art in itself. Name me the "Best 10 Coffee Shops in London" and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll jump over to check them out. Even when I don’t plan to follow up, I still find them valuable and engaging. I don’t really watch movies, but I look forward to the year-end best-of lists every December. I pore over reviews of theater plays in states I don’t live in. Unlike some, who consider taste so idiosyncratic there’s no point, I find lists, like mix-tapes, a hopeful enterprise, a way of witness: here, this moved me; it may do the same for you.

But I also think one needs to be responsible with best-of lists. Persons new to a genre trust such guides. If the lists lead neophytes astray, they might give up. For example, I have a friend who’s into EDM (electronic dance music). Knowing nothing about it, I asked for a list of representative tracks. I listened. Hearing nothing revelatory there, I’m now closed to the whole game. If someone later asks if I want to go to an EDM show, I’ll just dismiss the notion with a wave of my hand, “No thanks, I tried, it doesn’t do anything for me.”

It matters, is what I’m saying.

This is why many writers I know were upset when The Atlantic released a list earlier this month of the “Most Significant Poetry books of the Century (so far)”. Not because their own books were left off (although there is an Elegy Beta-sized hole right in the middle there, lol), but because the books on that list are, with only a couple of exceptions, on topics with which progressive Atlantic readers ideologically align. What are the odds? And at what point do artworks that consistently and explicitly espouse (or even discuss!) a certain side of political opinion become no longer art, but propaganda? That’s dangerous: many thousands of readers may encounter that list, choose a few to buy, and finding the books more interested in getting readers to vote a certain way than with making something enduring and beautiful, may swear off poetry altogether. That would be a shame because we’re in a renaissance, especially of Christian verse (for an orientation, check out: An Axe for the Frozen Sea.)

Also, I thought we were over this. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge warned against overly motivated writing in the 1820s. Immanuel Kant did so even earlier with his concept of “disinterestedness.” A poem book designed to sell a certain brand of dishwasher, for instance, could be a good artwork, but it’s pretty unlikely. As Archibald Macleish wrote, “A poem should not mean, but be.”

Here then is a list, from me to you. These are a poet’s poets. Some of them I admire for technical daring, others for intellectual range. I don’t agree with the politics of some, nor share a worldview with others. Some are by Christians, others are not. But they are all fine, important, dazzling works of poetry as poetry. Warning: this isn’t entry-level stuff. If you don’t already like and read poetry, maybe start somewhere else (I could make you a list!), but if you do, here is honeyed dew, the milk of paradise, and adventure worthy of the name.

(in no particular order)

Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All

Mark Strand, Man and Camel

AE Stallings, Hapax

Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw

Richard Kenney, The One-Strand River

Stephen Dunn, Different Hours

Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist

Jennifer Maier, Dark Alphabet

Dean Young, Solar Perplexus

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead

Don Paterson, Landing Light

Geoffrey Hill, Clavics

Matthew Dickman, All-American Poem

Averill Curdy, Song & Error

Scott Cairns, Anaphora

Heather McHugh, Upgraded to Serious

Louise Gluck, Averno

Andrew Hudgins, American Rendering

Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed

Li-Young Lee, Book of my Nights

Mary Szybist, Incarnadine

W.S. Merwin, Shadow of Sirius

Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy

Richard Wilbur, Anterooms

Tony Hoagland, What Narcisism Means to Me

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Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.