Top Ten...

1. Messy Room - Shel Silerstein
2. seeker of truth - e.e.cummings
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
4. Men - Maya Angelou
5. Dream Deferred - Langston Hughes
6. Dora Diller - Jack Prelutsky
7. The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe
8. The Dead - Sylvia Plath
9. Sea Shell - Amy Lowell
10. Kissass - Allen Ginsberg

Of these ten, the two that i would have to favor most are The Raven and Dora Diller. I think that The Raven is a dark and deep poem (one side of poetry) and Dora Diller is very light and silly (the other side). Having these two polar opposites on the same list is an oddity, but i feel that they really express the way that I feel about poetry; I like the depth that poetry can expose and the expression of emotion used, but then again I think that it has to be leveled out with something that can pull you out of that dark place that poems like The Raven take you to. If all poetry was one way or the other, I think that the genre, as a whole, would fall apart. No one can stand the sunshine of a poem like Dora Diller all day long, but the same has to be said for the depression that The Raven expresses.

I feel that poetry should be used to convey the author's emotions at the time, so both of the two that I chose reflect that. Dora Diller is very silly and talks about a little girl who ate a caterpiller. The Raven is very deep and discusses a mans interaction with the haunting image of a raven. The thing I just realized is that they are both linked to animals, very odd...