 | Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement by Sylvia Plath
Buy new: $18.96 / Used from: $5.57 Honestly, modern American poetry doesn't get much better than this. Chilly, passionate, furious, and above all and always language-centric.
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 | Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Buy used from: $6.97 I saw the best minds of my generation. . . vanguard, political, untouchable.
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 | Leaves of Grass, Second Edition (Norton Critical Editions) by Walt Whitman
Buy new: $13.77 / Used from: $3.99 Uncle Walt will indeed make you proud to be an American.
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 | Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) by Jim Carroll
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $2.74 Deserves knighthood for several things, including the little poem "Syringe."
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 | Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Buy new: $15.60 / Used from: $0.01 The other side of the Sylvia story--heartbreaking, brutal, unbelievably good.
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 | Poems (The collected works of W.B. Yeats) by W.B. Yeats
Buy new: $50.79 / Used from: $25.86 The father of post-modern poetry (don't tell T.S. Eliot, though).
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 | Cold Comfort: Selected Poems 1970-1996 by Lyn Lifshin
Buy new: $25.95 / Used from: $12.50 Lyn's the reason I became a poet (again, don't tell T.S. Eliot).
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 | The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $4.73 Religiously beautiful.
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 | A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems (New Directions Paperback No. 74) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $2.68 A touchingly funny daredevil of joy.
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 | Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit by Charles Bukowski
Buy new: $11.70 / Used from: $7.28 A miserable self-destructive drunk, yes, but some of his stuff is so right.
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 | Borges: Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
Buy new: $13.60 / Used from: $8.40 Genius, no matter what the medium.
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 | Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems by R. Rilke
Buy new: $19.77 / Used from: $3.98 The sometimes bad and lonely dream of love.
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 | The world according to B.Z. Niditch: 1993 maxim a day by B. Z Niditch
Prolific, but so difficult to find--that must make him a genius?
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 | Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
Buy new: $19.95 / Used from: $3.95 Three for the price of one. . . I prefer Baudelaire myself.
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 | The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons (Oxford World's Classics) by John Donne
Buy used from: $2.04 Kind of difficult for modern readers, but so lovely.
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| The new modern poetry;: An anthology of American and British poetry since World War II, by M. L Rosenthal
Buy used from: $0.97 When in doubt, start with a good anthology.
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 | The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $8.98 Essential, if only because the cover is so fabulous.
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