Exploring My Bookshelves: Poetry Anthologies

Exploring My Bookshelves is a weekly meme created by Victoria at Addlepates and Book Nerds and co-hosted with Shannon at For the Love of Words. Visit either blog for the list of topics.

This week’s topic:

A book of poetry

As you can see, I’ve selected two. Yeah, I know, I’m a rebel.

These two are poetry anthologies I was required to buy for a British literature class in college. We were required to purchase many books for that class but of all the books, I looked forward to reading these the least. You see, I’m not a fan of poetry. I’ve been this way since high school where I began to feel a niggling sense of hate towards poetry that slowly consumed me the more I had to analyze them in AP literature classes. At the time, I thought the teachers assigned the poems only to torment me because they knew I couldn’t tell what they were about or what sort of meter they’re in since I could never tell which syllables are stressed or unstressed.

Despite that, there are a few poems I enjoy, some of them were shared in past posts for this meme (see here and here). Of these anthologies, I prefer the collection of Victorian poetry. In it are poems by Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, and Lord Tennyson. Sometimes a weird mood will hit me on a Sunday and I’ll laze in bed, reading aloud the poems in this book.

The collection of Romantic poetry contains poems by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, and others. It’s been a while since I’ve read them so I can’t tell why I enjoyed the Victorian poems more than the Romantic ones.

Anyways, what poetry books do you treasure?

How this meme works:

1. Take a “shelfie” (a picture of your bookshelf). Preferably literal, but e-shelves work too.
2. Write something on the day’s prompt.
3. Give the blurb and the cover of the book (and what you thought of it if you’ve read it).
4. Link back to Victoria’s post.

My bookshelf:

my bookcase

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