Favourite poems

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Simon Armitage Favourite poems

This selection contains a few all-time favourites and one or two current obsessions. I became interested in poetry at school. We were reading Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin – contemporary poets at the time, though all dead now. Their work got me reading, then writing.

Since then I've been working my way back through time, wading out from the shore of the here-and-now into deeper waters. Some of these choices are quite partisan. I don't suppose I'd be as keen on the dialect poetry of Samuel Laycock if I hadn't been born in the village where he was born. And the Wakefield Mystery Plays have a local importance which enhances their significance in my eyes. Recently, I've been working on a film-documentary about soldiers who've returned from action suffering from combat-stress, writing verbatim-poetry from their testimonies and statements. It's made me look again at the War Poets, of whom Ivor Gurney is the most under-rated. Unless the nature of poetry or the nature of war changes dramatically, it's difficult to imagine 'literary poetry' coming to us so directly from the front-line of human conflict again.

Looking through, there's little or no 'modernism' here. This is because of my preference for poetry which sounds like some form of speech, or has a direct relationship with the human voice. I am interested in theoretical poetry - writing which sounds like thought, writing which sounds like writing - but not interested enough to include any in this list.

© Simon Armitage, 2007

About Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire in 1963. He works as a writer, playwright and poet, and has written extensively for radio and television. Previous titles include Kid, Killing Time, The Universal Home Doctor and Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid, which was shortlisted for the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize. His translation of the classic Middle English poem, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, was published by Faber in January to great acclaim.  

Simon Armitage's selection of poems

• W H Auden, 'The Fall of Rome'
• Ted Hughes, 'Cock Crows'
• James Tate, 'The Memories of Fish'
• John Cooper Clarke, 'Beezley Street'
• Sylvia Plath, 'The Rabbit Catcher'
• Ivor Gurney, 'First Time In'
• Thomas Hardy, 'The Whitewashed Wall'
• William Wordsworth, from 'Michael', (lines 392-439)
• Samuel Laycock, 'Welcome Bonny Brid'
• 'Lazarus', from The Wakefield Mystery Plays (translation by Simon Armitage)

Related links

Simon Armitage

• www.simonarmitage.co.uk