Joseph Pearce's Poetry List

 

Joseph Pearce shows up in the strangest places.

I used to teach at a classical education school. Although I'm now retired, I still get catalogs from companies from which I ordered classical materials. One of those companies is Memoria Press, which puts out a publication called The Classical Teacher.

Amid the lists of catechetical materials in the most recent edition of that publication there are several articles, including one by Joseph Pearce: "Poems Everyone Should Know."

He lists the poems in three categories: Epics, Verse Drama, and Lyric Poetry.

Epics:

The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer

The Aeneid - Virgil 
Beowulf

The Divine Comedy - Dante

He gives an honorable mention to The Lord of the Rings, which he describes an a prose epic, not a novel, but since is is not a poem, it does not make the official list.

Verse Drama:

Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Hamlet
King Lear

Lyric poetry

"Upon the Image of Death" - Saint Robert Southwell
"Hymn Before Sunrise" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Wreck of The Deutschland" - Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Wasteland - T. S. Eliot
"Tarantella" - Hilaire Belloc

Interesting list. I take pride in that I've read all but one them, having somehow missed encountering "Hymn Before Sunrise." 

Guess I have to find that lyric just to say I've read them all next time I run into Pearce.