Providing Solace and Hope
Poetry recommendations from Marquette English
2 min readApr 8, 2020
Members of the Department of English have come together to provide recommendations of their favorite poems and poets to provide solace and hope to our Marquette community during these difficult times.
Poem Recommendations
- W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Ernst Toller”
- W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
- Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
- Wendell Berry, “Stay Home”
- Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
- Martin Buber, “Power and Love”
- Lucille Clifton, “Won’t You Celebrate With Me”
- Billy Collins, “The Lanyard”
- Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance”
- Robert Frost, “Directive”
- Thomas Hardy, “Darkling Thrush”
- Joy Harjo, “Remember”
- Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
- Seamus Heaney, “St. Kevin and the Blackbird”
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”
- Mark Jarman, The Heronry
- John Keats, “To Autumn”
- James Merrill, “Nine-Steep Valley”
- John Milton, “Lycidas”
- Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation”
- Ben Myers, “Night Hoops”
- Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4”
- Frank O’Hara, “Why I am Not a Painter”
- Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
- Matthew Olzmann, “Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session After the Reading, Asked for Career Advice”
- Alice Oswald, Memorial
- Marge Piercy, “The Place Where Everything Changed”
- Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
- Jelaluddin Rumi, “Story Water”
- Siegfried Sassoon, “Everyone Sang”
- Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
- Sara Teasdale, “Barter”
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
- Lynn Ungar, “Pandemic”
- William Wordsworth, “We are Seven”
- William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
About the Department of English
In the Department of English at Marquette University, storytelling is our passion. We are a community of creative thinkers who love to read and learn from great stories and to tell the stories that need to be told. We know the enduring importance of critical thinking, creative problem solving, and powerful writing in an ever-changing global economy.
