Eighty-one poets, from nearly every school and political persuasion, responded to Peter Davis's request for material for a book the primary audience for which "might be younger poets":
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Please list 5-10 books that have been most "essential" to you, as a poet.
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Please write some comments about your list. You may want to single out specific poems or passages from the books, discuss how you made your decisions, or provide thoughts about the importance of these books in your life. Feel free to write as much as you like.
The eighty-one being poets, and very different poets, at that, the responses were … various. And they make Poet's Bookshelf a delightful book for browsing, whether you're just beginning to find your way in contemporary poetry and want a copious guide, or you're interested in what your favorite poets recommend, or you want to know who else has read your own neglected favorites. Henri Coulette's "War of the Secret Agents," for instance, gets nods from W. D. Snodgrass and another poet I can no longer find—which brings up my only complaint: this book cries out for an index of poets and titles.
But what what fun it is! I was glad to see Maxine Kumin here, though her list was as unsurprising as Wilbur's was amazing (mostly intellectual comfort for lonely formalists). X. J. Kennedy had the courage to name Mother Goose first. Peter Meinke is completely unknown to me, but anyone whose list starts with Dostoevsky and ends with Yeats, Nemeorv, and Wilbur is someone I have to read. It's gratifying, given the amount of Stafford-bashing that goes on in blogland, to see his work mentioned often. It's astonishing to me that W. C. Williams is mentioned many more times than Shakespeare or Yeats, and beats out Dickinson 17-16 (and Frost only twice!). I'm going to have to finally sit down and read Charlotte Mew (if I can find her).
I do have a quibble which seems almost ungenerous to mention. This is the Sonnetarium, though, and I can't help noticing that of the 25 poets in the Rebel Angels anthology, only Andrew Hudgins and Molly Peacock appear here. I have no idea whether the rest chose not to respond or whether they simply are as unfamiliar to Mr. Davis as many of the poets in the book are to me. Given the balkanization of the poetry world, the latter is likely, and metrical and narrative poets are certainly not neglected.
One other quibble: I'm going to have to redo my budget because of the poets and books I've discovered in Peter Davis's Poet's Bookshelf.
9:01:58 PM 
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