100 books like The War Poets

The Best of It seems like an easy, leisurely read at first. However, so many of Kay Ryan’s poems lulled me into a false sense of security, and then they pounced. Not with claws out, but rather with padded paws to catch my mind-fall as my brain went, ‘Wait. What?’ and I had to stop and read the poem or lines over again. This simple yet complex and profound collection of contemporary poetry will stay with me for life to inspire, question, make me laugh, and offer solace.

Poems for Life is one of my all-time favourite poetry collections because it offers something for every mood and occasion. At those times I’ve found myself planning a celebration, trying to write a love poem for dear hubby’s birthday, or struggling to find words for a funeral, and stuck for ideas, this book has provided the perfect sentiment and inspiration. It takes us from birth and beginnings, through childhood and childish things, into growing up and first impressions, to making a living and making love, as well as family life, growing older, and all the way through to death and mourning. This delightful book of poems offers comfort and words to treasure for a lifetime.

Hues of Hope is a captivating book of poetry centered around the theme of hope, which enchanted and moved me. Its pages are ones I will return to again and again, especially when the world seems at its darkest. This collection offers not only hope, but also self-reliance, courage, lessons learnt, and the beauty in the midst of a life lived with trials and tribulations and ultimate self-discovery. I cannot recommend this collection of poems highly enough.

Any time I feel down or struggle with my long-term illness, I reach for this book of amazing poetry. The Emergency Poet never fails to soothe my distress. The verses within help me relax and take stock. To reassess and decompress. As I sit and absorb these wonderful words, I am reminded to live in the moment and value what I have. This book feels like a warm hug at the end of a long and tiring day and always lifts my spirits.

This book is packed with fascinating, dramatic, and sometimes bizarre tales of swimming lore from history and literature. Sprawson is also fascinated with the swimming world’s legacy to Hollywood in the thirties and forties, exploring the careers of “aquamusical” star Esther Williams and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who starred in a dozen Tarzan movies. Sprawson’s reputation as a literary writer about swimming is second only to that of Roger Deakins. What gives the book a strange fascination for many people is the fact that after the publication of Haunts of the Black Masseur, Sprawson never wrote another one.

This play conveys the inner world of nationalism in both its romance and fanaticism.

Yeats’s play became a cult for young revolutionary nationalists in celebrating blood sacrifice for the nation. A young man joins an uprising on the eve of his wedding after meeting an old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan (a folk name for Ireland), who pleads for his help to recover her green fields. By his sacrifice, Cathleen is transformed into a beautiful young woman with "the face of a queen." 

Yeats later agonised over this play and developed a more ambivalent attitude to nationalism. When young nationalists staged a sacrificial rebellion in 1916, he warned in his poem "Easter 1916" that "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." He asked in a later poem, "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" 

William Butler Yeats was a truly great poet who lived during revolutionary times in Ireland. I am recommending his poetry collection because his poems reflect the revolutionary times he lived in, but also because Yeats himself lived a revolutionary life of change. One of the things I most admire about Yeats is that his poetry continues to change right until the end of his life. He was never satisfied with his own work, and he always looked coldly and critically at himself. His epitaph is, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.”

In his poem ‘The Great Day,’ Yeats presents an image of two beggars, one on horseback whipping another on foot. After the revolution, the beggars changed places, but the whip went on. This is a remarkable image–unfortunately, one that my research shows to be close to the truth.

I spent eighteen years writing the authorized biography of W.B. Yeats, and he haunts me still.

Though his poetry is world-famous, his autobiographies are less well known; yet they illuminate like nothing else the experience of living between Ireland and England and the contrast between a childhood in late-Victorian County Sligo and coming of age in the artistic circles of fin-de-siecle London.

At the end of his life, Yeats reflected on the tension between his Irish background and English conditioning and the contradictory feelings they inspired, writing, "My hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate." Elsewhere, he wrote that poetry comes out of "the struggle with ourselves," and his autobiographies show this to mesmerizing effect.

Yeats, a mystic poet, travelled across Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, asking country people if they’d ever seen fairies and taking down their stories. “I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see,” he wrote in an earlier book, The Celtic Twilight. “Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing….” Yates believed the songs and stories "handed down among the cottages” were “Folk art [which]… because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations… is the soil where all great art is rooted.”  His own poetry bears this out. 

This quintessential Arthur Machen collection of thirteen of his most highly praised stories and short novels was my introduction to Arthur Machen, and like Rider Haggard’s work, affected me deeply, to the extent that I eventually needed to “soak up some Arthur Machan country” and flew to Wales (from California) for no other purpose.

Arthur Machen is known best for the exceptionally vivid, mind-numbingly creepy horror stories that he wrote in the late 1880s, which have hugely inspired Lovecraft, Stephen King, and T.E.D. Kline, among many others. Machen’s work is, nearly all of it, alchemical; that is, by some divine magic, he made mere words and sentences seem far more than the sum of their parts; when he strung together any eight words, they would always sound more charming than the same eight words strung together by any other author.