Among other things, it includes Kenneth Fearing’s “American Rhapsody #4,” for which I have been fruitlessly searching the Internet for years. I remembered the title as simply “American Rhapsody,” but searching for “Kenneth Rexroth” plus that title gets me nowhere. I had no idea you have to add the “4”!

It also has Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Night,” which I’ve always liked a lot, and my copy of his collected poetry is also still entrapped in cardboard somewhere in the cellar.

So for those who may not know of it, Mr. Untermeyer’s collection contains hundreds and hundreds of poems, along with prefatory material. But wait! Archive.org has it available (6th Ed.) for download:

https://ia800703.us.archive.org/7/items/modernamericanpo030000mbp/modernamericanpo030000mbp.pdf

(Also in other formats at

https://archive.org/details/modernamericanpo030000mbp/page/n6 )

Highly recommended!

And of course you can find in the collection Mr. Fearing’s and Mr. Jeffers’ poems mentioned above, whether downloaded or online. Along with much other delectable stuff.

Turning to my personal most favoritest ev-ah, I have to include Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (in particular the first stanza, for the imagery) and Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium). About 1/89th of a tier below that … are too many wonderful poems to list. But I must include Donne, Keats, and, gosh!, Mr. Eliot — in particular “Ash Wednesday” and the first of the Six Preludes. Plus more of Stevens and Yeats, of course.

Great topic, great discussion, wonderful comments. Thanks, Neo. And thanks, to all the commenters. :<)))

PS. Also I seem to remember some dude wrote a sonnet about how he beats the blues. “When in disgrace ….” In my case, I can think of my Honey, my daughter, or my dog. ;>)))

As it happens, “The Green Door” started playing a couple of days ago on the record player of my mind, and hasn’t quit yet. I think it’s been in absentia for at least 30 years. “Midnight, one more night without sleeping….”

Heh! :>))

Contrariwise, I believe (per LDS doctrine) that we are very important to God, because we are his children, being that he organized us into spiritual intelligences, and then provided the mortal/temporal housing.
Jesus calls his closest disciples his friends, as well, so I am assuming he thought they were important, and then extended that to everyone who believes his gospel and followes him.

“The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine.

“It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.

“I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.”

Letter to Sister Mary James Power

First Line: Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
Last Line: Reason will not decide at last: the sword will decide

I obviously had never looked into it, and just assumed that it was about what it seems to be about. When I read this poem to my mom, toward the end of her life, she didn’t understand it the way I did at all; she seemed to think it was about the Spanish Civil War. I didn’t get that, but perhaps she was on to something….

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_love_song_of_ts_eliot.html