Poetry Warhorses Thread, anyone?

What are some members' favourites in the oeuvre of William Carlos Williams, for example?

I think the concept of a warhorse has a degree of contempt - it is something that is popular, but those with more experience or knowledge hold to be over-rated.

In English poetry I was aware from my mother's copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury what were regarded as the pre-World War One canon of English poetry.  I wasn't aware until the sixth form that F R Leavis had declared an alternative canon - Pope, Donne, Herbert and Eliot.

A warhorse is a poem learnt by heart at school, and I did not do that apart from The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  My partner says he learnt reams at school (I must test him one day.)

A few poetic warhorses from yesteyear:

Milton L'allegro and il penseroso - I'm listening to Handel's setting and what a string of instant cliches.

Milton Opening of Paradise Lost

Wordsworth Those flaming daffodils

Shelley Ode to the West Wind.  I was advised to learn this by heart by a speech therapist after I lost my voice.  F R Leavis despised Shelley, and though it goes against the grain to agree with that arrogant old don, I can't disagree here.

Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn?  Ode to Autumn (which I just learnt was written in the water meadows near Winchester - IGI country)  I have more sympathy with Keats than other romantics, but I am not that warm.

Tennyson Where do we begin?  Just stick a pin into the Complete Poems.  Tears idle tears, Ulysses, Crossing the Bar, The Brook (O dear), The Revenge, and on and on.

Browning - it is tinner's party piece to recite My Last Duchess by heart given any encouragement, so we will take it as read.

And for modern poetry Wilfred Owen that sonnet ending with the wonderful lines about "Each slow dusk the drawing down of blinds."  My poetry is war and the pity of war.  Phooey.  He was brill at Tennysonian vowel music.

Tennyson certainly fits my 'war-horse' category - an entire brigade of 'war horses' in fact. I merely see his name and my 'imperialist claptrap' detectors are set to 'high'. Half a league isn't nearly far enough, Lord Alfred. Someone has indeed blundered - whoever included your tripe in poetry anthologies

I never thought of that, though I suppose you're right. I think Betjeman's is a better poem though (its sentimentality runs up more productively against a vividly evoked adversity, which makes the last line heart-wrenching where Tennyson's is a pile-up of twee metaphors):

I made hay while the sun shone,
My work sold.
Now that the harvest is over
And the world cold,
Give me the bonus of laughter
As I lose hold.


Is no one else going to post any poems on this thread?

Perhaps not in the same way tinners, but this is a dreadful old warhorse:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

etc etc etc zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I am only thinking of German examples. Hm.

That's the only poem I ever remember having to learn by heart at school.  My younger brother and sister also had to do so.  It made our mother thoroughly sick of hearing it, so I can only imagine how our English teachers must have felt...

I can also recite Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin from start to finish, but that's mostly because we did a staged version of it in primary school drama group when I was about 9, and I had to narrate a lot of it.  I didn't have to learn it by heart for that, but somehow it got into my brain and stuck there.  Similarly, several of the Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales are still lodged firmly in my mind - I wonder if anyone would consider them warhorses?  Curiously, the other day 'Matilda' popped into my head and I realised I'd forgotten four lines from the middle.  I had to look them up before I could focus or concentrate on anything else 

I was taking the 'Warhorse' aspect in the same spirit as in Martle's parallel thread i.e. works that you had put to one side as being overfamiliar and not that interesting but which turn out, on re-encountering them, to contain much more than that.

In that context I would definitely put Tennyson as a supposed fusty 'old Warhorse' who turns out to be much better and more subtle than I had remembered or had assumed for years.

All very subjective, of course but there is also the business of separating out "Do I agree with this poet? Does his/her world view conveniently line up with mine?" from "Is this poet any good?" (the latter being the one that counts IMHO). In that context (and with all deference to Andy) I'd put Kipling in the company of "Poets who turn out to be much more interesting that I think they are going to be."